


nobody no body nobody

by firstaudrina



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Downworlder Jace, F/M, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Werewolf Jace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2019-08-29 13:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 32,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16744486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Jace becomes a werewolf. Maia picks up the pieces.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girljustdied](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girljustdied/gifts).



> Timeline irrelevant. Written for [this prompt](https://stainofmylove.dreamwidth.org/255640.html?thread=6984088#cmt6984088) at this lovely (ongoing!) ficathon.

“Well, fuck.”

Maia surveys Jace with her arms crossed, hip cocked, but her face isn’t as expressive as her body. She grimaces but her eyebrows draw together, enigmatic but tense. He looks so strange without runes. 

The rest of the pack is arrayed loosely around her, but Maia stands apart, ahead. She doesn’t know if she stepped forward or they stepped back, but for some reason this has been placed into her hands: Luke has sunk into a booth, reeling; Bat is too fresh to feel anything but newbie sympathy. The rest are excited, or uneasy. Fresh blood, but it’s Shadowhunter blood. They still hold that against Luke. The Jade Wolf is silent, waiting. And there’s a vein pulsing in Jace’s jaw as he waits on them in return.

Maia sighs, finally, and lets her arms unfold. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s get you cleaned up, at least.”

He doesn’t move, so she hooks a hand around his bicep on the way and hauls him back into the kitchen, back beyond it where there is no one keeping an eye out for all the ways he is different now. No one except her. 

Most of the time you had to wait to see if someone would turn, but Jace’s runes are gone so that seems like confirmation enough.

The scratches curve around his shoulder and down onto his chest, four heavy furrows in the flesh that will not knit back together. His shirt had split along each one, the thin black fabric heavy and wet with his blood. He has other surface wounds but the scratches are the worst and that makes it seem like a pointed attack. Revenge, maybe. She wonders if he’s ever gotten this badly hurt without being able to heal himself handily with a stele, but the stoicism of his locked jaw tells her everything she needs to know. His breathing is a little ragged, hitching now and then, but he hasn’t so much as winced since he staggered through the door, holding that one arm so strange. 

“Can I?”

His uninjured shoulder jerks into a shrug. “What difference does it make?”

Maia touches him briskly, as though nothing has changed, tearing the shirt at the seam so she can fold it back from the wound. “That’s true,” she remarks, conversational. “It’s going to scar either way. Afraid you won’t be so pretty anymore?”

He makes a rumbling, arrested noise; maybe a laugh. “Uh-huh. You got me.”

She had taken the first aid kid from one of the kitchen shelves on their way and she opens it now, looking for cotton pads and alcohol. He’s right, it doesn’t make a difference. This flesh will warp and ripple no matter what they do, whether his skin is clean or not, whether someone has taken the time for him or not. But no one took the time for her and after Bat it’s easier to pretend this is a responsibility she can take on without trauma lighting up her brain. 

It’s stupid, but she kind of remembers the runes he used to have here before. There had been three gathered across his collarbones; older, faded ones layered on his chest. They weren’t his only scars but they were the starkest, and they’re gone. Under all the drying blood she sponges off, there’s only skin. His necklace is clotted, the silver ring muted by red. 

“You’re not the only one,” she says, voice harder than she means for it to sound. “Luke’s having a moment —” Like she’d had for a second there, with Bat. Too much familiarity to function. “— but he’s going to be here for you. And your mom, I heard she doesn’t have runes anymore. Right? You’re not the only one. And both of them are fine. Right? They’re _fine_.”

This is important, because Maia had been the only girl in her senior year who sat stiffly through class with a bandage on her throat while everyone whispered about what happened to her. She was the only one who met sympathetic teachers’ eyes, weathered classmates who acted like her kind of hurt was contagious. She had three months in between infection and flight: three months of turning accidentally, once in the girls’ locker room when Cady Curtis said some shit about girls who got hit by their boyfriends, once on the way to a chemistry test for no reason. And she’d had Luke to call eventually and a pack waiting for her in New York at the end of it, but she was alone every day, all day, for three months. 

“Okay,” Jace says evenly. “I guess I can’t complain, then, huh?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Maia’s fingers slip and she catches herself with both hands flat on Jace’s arm, needs a minute to take a breath. “You can bitch all you want, you just can’t let it eat you alive.” 

After a moment, Jace lifts a hand and puts it on top of hers, then lets it drop again. “Not allowed?”

Maia breathes. “No. It’s an order. You’re great at those.”

“Debatable.”

“Well, you like them.”

She can tell by his eyes that he’s almost mad about it, but his lips shift a little like maybe he might have laughed under other circumstances. “Can’t argue that.”

Maia helps him out of the shirt entirely and bandages him up even if it’s pointless. She spends too long fussing with it because she knows he doesn’t want to go back out into the restaurant, because he hasn’t moved a muscle since he arrived unless prompted. He stumbled into a booth, then sat with his shoulders hunched and gaze averted; he did the same thing when she brought him back here. Finally, she says, “How?”

Jace shakes his head. 

“Okay.” Maia wets her lips. They can cross that bridge later, whenever she finds out why he’s here without his brother and sister, if they even know what happened. “You came straight here?”

Jace closes his eyes and opens them. “How much does it hurt?”

“To turn?”

He nods.

How much does it hurt when all your bones snap, crackle, and pop into a whole new configuration? When your skin tears across a hundred fault lines so fur can grow like weeds in a garden, when something else takes over and replaces the you that you thought you were? 

“You can handle it,” Maia says. 

He finally looks up at her and if he fucking cries she doesn’t know what the hell she’s going to do. “For the rest of my life?” he says, so small and pathetic and hopeless. She knows exactly what it’s like looking down the barrel of that particular gun. 

Maia drops to a crouch so they’re eye to eye and confirms, “That’s the deal.”

“It’s not a deal. It’s a sentence.”

“I know.” That’s it, that’s all there is to it. No take-backs. Almost absently, she wonders what he will look like as a wolf, if he’ll be blond like Gretel was silver. If his eyes will still be weird. She smoothes his hair back unthinkingly, leaves it streaked with blood by accident. 

Something about that strengthens her resolve. She sits back and pulls her shirt off, drops it atop his mangled one. “You know what you are,” Maia says. “We don’t have to wait for it.”

Jace stares at her. “What?”

“I know you can feel it already.” Weeks before Maia turned for the first time, she felt that thrumming, like there was someone else’s heart inside her body. She touches his chest. “Yeah?”

He swallows. “Yeah.”

She nods. She knows it’s not better, but, “It’s going to happen no matter what. But you can make it happen.”

“How?”

Maia stands up to shed belt and boots and skirt, says, “You’re an exhibitionist, right?”

He rolls his eyes, which is better than not laughing at all. She’ll trick him into it, eventually. He follows suit, looks more vulnerable than either of them is comfortable with. She should leave a note for Luke, but he’s a detective; he’ll figure it out.

Maia takes Jace outside where it is silent and cool, the wind only just beginning to catch the bite of winter. She sees his stance relax without his meaning it to, even as confusion flits across his features. She knows that no rune could give him the sense of smell he has now, or the ability to hear for miles. “Don’t think about that yet,” she orders. “It’s waiting. It wants to run. You just have to give in to it.”

She turns to demonstrate but Jace catches her arm unexpectedly and pulls her back. He places a hand on her neck, opposite her scars, his thumb just nestled into the hollow of her collarbones. And he says, “Thank you.”

“You’re pack now,” she tells him, because she knows things like that matter to him. “Come on.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one knows what to do with Jace, so Maia brings him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out I'm not done with this yet!

No one knows what to do with Jace, so Maia brings him home.

But first they run all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and back, water at one side and buildings at the other, too fast for mundanes to do anything but gasp uncertainly at the sight of two such creatures running wild in New York. Jace keeps up with her, which isn’t exactly a surprise, though it still makes Maia’s fur rise. There is no better feeling than running loose with your own kind; in the days before Valentine returned, they used to take regular trips upstate just to rush through the woods. She’ll have to bring that up with Luke now. Jace will need the woods. 

He is blond as a wolf, like she thought. His fur is sandy and pale, but almost reddish along his back and ears, just a little bit burnt. He smells different too. As a Shadowhunter he’d been all ichor and iron, a scent that made her teeth vibrate in her skull in a way that she did not, against all odds, find entirely unpleasant. Now that metal taste is gone and she cannot yet put her finger on what has replaced it.

Once they’re back behind the Jade Wolf, Maia transforms first so she can watch him come back to himself. This part is harder because the wolf always wants to hang on, and she can see him panic for a second when it doesn’t work. She doesn’t say anything, just waits for him to push through it. And eventually he does.

Fur turns soft and short until it melts into skin. His body folds up into something smaller and more defenseless, limbs jerking and bones cracking until he’s left on all fours in the alley, naked and gasping with his fingers scrabbling against the ground. He sits back on his heels, chest heaving, and looks at her — a wild look, furious but hungry somehow, and Maia stops herself from stepping towards him, but barely. 

The pack owns the buildings around the restaurant and has converted them into housing, but Maia and Luke know Jace can’t be left there, for everyone else’s safety as much as his own. “I can bring him home,” Luke says, already easing, already determined. He studies Jace with a prickling sympathetic openness, like he’s gazing back in time. Jace doesn’t make eye contact.

“It’s cool,” Maia says before she can tell her brain to shut up. “I’ve got him.”

Luke raises his eyebrows. She rolls her eyes.

“Just for tonight. I don’t think he’s ready for a Werewolf Dad pep talk yet, okay?” She nudges Jace. “Are you, blondie?”

But Jace moves towards the doorway, away from them, and doesn’t answer except to say, “I’ll wait outside.”

Luke gives Maia a fondly frustrated look that she’s come to recognize. “You know packs aren’t democracies, right?”

“Mhm,” she says, following after Jace. “If alphas were elected, I’d win.” 

That’s not strictly true, of course. They already doubt her loyalty because of Simon; taking a Shadowhunter under her wing won’t help. 

Former. Former Shadowhunter.

Maia borrows someone’s jacket from the coat rack and tosses it at Jace as she steps outside. It’s too tight on his shoulders but it covers him, at least. His shirt had been unsalvageable but the transformation was good for him: his scratches have already partially knitted together, the mutilated flesh turned to tender new pink skin. 

“You don’t live here?” he asks, brusque, voice raw. 

“Lone wolf,” she quips. She used to live with Gretel — the two youngest girls striking out for themselves in a pack full of so many older men — but now she’s by herself in a cheaper studio in Sunset Park. 

“Where —” She can see his throat constrict around the question, his chest dipping sharply in a shallow inhale. “I can’t go back —”

“Hey.” Maia reaches out to zip the jacket he’d left open like some kind of idiot on a romance novel. “Don’t think about it. Tonight there’s a sofa with your name on it. If you’re good I’ll even give you a blanket.”

“Lucky me.”

“I said _if_.”

They walk because trains are too hard when you’re new, too contained for a body that’s itching to expand. He has not lost the clenched tension he had when he first showed up in the doorway of the Jade Wolf, damaged and bleeding, but now it’s in conflict with a new kind: too many sounds, too many smells, the buffet of the city ripe enough to taste. He lists sideways until he’s shoulder to shoulder with Maia and she curls a hand around his wrist, squeezes.

“See, it’s not just that the world’s all lit up, suddenly,” she says. “It’s not just that the Thai place on the corner smells incredible. It’s that you can smell the coconut milk in the curry. Closer and you’d know where the pig lived before it was slaughtered.” 

“It’s ridiculous,” he says gruffly. 

“Tell me about it,” she says. “I mean that. Separate it. Pick it out piece by piece.”

He’s quiet for a block but then he tells her about the man walking head of them with takeout, everything in the bag and what it’s made out of, the fragranced detergent that the man’s shirt was washed in and the chemicals underneath.

“I should’ve known that even as a werewolf you’d be a show-off,” she says. Jace’s pulse jumps under her fingers at the word, _wolf_. 

Maia’s infection was slow. She doesn’t know if Jace’s enhanced blood has sped his along so rapidly, or if it’s just the bad luck of all Shadowhunters who find themselves transformed into monsters. Sickness crept on her for weeks. It made her nauseous whenever she ate chocolate and ravenous for raw meat. She thought maybe she was pregnant. But Jordan left her something much more horrifying than even that, and she only found out after an outdoor movie night at the Hudson River Park ended with another girl’s blood on her hands. 

“I —” Maia starts, but her voice stutters out. She wants to say _I hurt someone my first night_. She wants to say _I was alone until Luke found me_. She wants to say _pack is not just a word_. But instead she sees a Key Food up ahead and takes the diversion when it’s offered her. “I’m starving, and your energy must be majorly depleted. Let’s stop.”

She leaves Jace outside on the street like a dog tied to a parking meter but keeps an eye on him through the window. She stocks up on packaged meat, complex carbohydrates, tender fruits. She’s really regretting not getting Thai food. Once outside again, she thrusts an apple at him. “Eat.”

He eats.

Maia and Jace never took their ill-advised romp bedside, and it feels weirdly more intimate to let him into her apartment now. Before, he was just fun — to flirt with and fight with, to fuck. He didn’t have to mean anything to her. It’s self-absorbed, maybe, because he’s the one going through it right now. But tonight has brought upheaval to her little world, too. 

He looks out of place amongst her things, hovering awkwardly next to the couch with its pink chevron-patterned pillows, blood in his hair and dirt on his clothes. He’s still not really focusing on anything, especially not her, so Maia leaves him to his vacant staring while she rifles through the dresser. The only guys’ clothes she has are Simon’s, so they’ll have to do.

Jace wrinkles his nose at the Rock Solid Panda t-shirt she tosses his way like the little rich boy he still is. “Shower?”

“Help yourself.” Maia sinks onto the couch when he’s gone, presses her forehead against the heels of her hands and takes a gratifyingly deep breath. But she barely has a second to steady herself when there’s the brutal sound of an impact followed by a small downpour of glass on tile.

She’s on her feet immediately. In the bathroom she finds Jace staring at the frame where the mirror once was, breathing hard, his knuckles split. There are shards in the sink, on the floor, everywhere.

“Oh, you are so fucking stupid,” she breathes. She pushes him aside as she pushes into the room, mirror crunching under her boots, and drops the lid on the toilet so he can sit. “Stay.”

“You gonna clean up after me all night?”

“You gonna keep making messes?”

Moments like this, she wishes she was like Magnus so she could sweep up all the debris with a flourish of the hand. Instead she must go the depressingly mundane route of dustpan and brush, resigning herself to probably stepping on a glass splinter barefoot sometime in the future. That’s being a wolf: too supernatural to live a normal life, but mundane enough that you still have to do everything the hard way.

God, there’s glass in her _toothbrush_. 

Feeling a flutter of déjà vu, Maia squats and takes Jace’s hand. She uses tweezers to carefully pluck silver slivers from his newly mangled skin. Blood, and this boy. “This is my home, you know,” she says, restrained or trying to be. “If you’re in the smashing things phase, then you’re going to have to find somewhere else to do it.”

His uninjured hand sits on his knee so tightly clenched that it’s actually shaking. She doesn’t think it’s because punching the mirror hurt so bad.

“I did dumb things too when I turned,” Maia says. 

He clears his throat, speaks low. “Like what?”

“Like almost kill someone.” She meets his faintly startled eyes. “Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t start my attempted murder tour with you.”

“They live?”

Maia nods. She concentrates on the task at hand, wincing when she catches his skin even though he doesn’t. “She did. Didn’t turn either. That was how Luke found me.”

“How did you…?”

“Turn?” She’s all business, she’s not bothered. “You know Jordan, right? Simon’s roommate? He used to be my boyfriend. We broke up. I tried to move on. He wasn’t happy about it. Hence.” She gestures at her neck.

The dull zombie cast fades from his face, replaced by a Shadowhunter’s alertness. “What?”

She shrugs. “How did _you_?” She doesn’t expect him to answer, and when he doesn’t, she continues, “It’s not like it is for vampires. It’s all entwined for them — blood and sex and biting. It’s more intimate and it takes a lot longer.”

Stiffly, “I’m familiar.”

Interesting. “They form a bond with their progeny whether they like it or not. With wolves, it’s like getting sneezed on by the wrong person in the subway. It can be random and sudden. You may never see that person again and you don’t owe them anything. Pack is what you make of it. It doesn’t matter where you come from.”

“Of course it matters.” 

“You think that because you’re a Shadowhunter. You’re all about lineage and whatever the fuck else. But I’m telling you, it doesn’t.”

Neither of them speaks for a minute, but then he says, “I know it matters because I find out I’m someone new every goddamn day. If it doesn’t matter where I came from or who I am now, then what the fuck does matter?”

Maia’s momentarily lost for words. She’d forgotten, gotten too tangled up in all the things she’d wanted to hear. “Is that why you hit the mirror?”

His hurt fingers contract. Fresh blood streaks down the side of his hand. “I was looking at myself, and I just —” He laughs roughly. “Who the fuck am I?”

In some ways it might be harder for Jace. When you’re a mundane thrown into a situation far beyond your wildest imaginings, you can only accept the facts as they are handed to you. Jace has a lifetime of misinformation to unlearn. Shadowhunters have no idea all the things Downworlders do just to get through the day. 

“I’m sorry,” Maia tells him. No one had ever said that to her, except Jordan, years too late. 

Jace studies her. “Me too.” His hand rests loosely in hers, first aid forgotten. “Do you want me to kill Jordan?”

Surprise makes her laugh. “The last thing you need right now is the Praetor Lupus on your ass.”

He allows that with a shrug, like, _keep me posted_. “I killed the person who did this to me.”

Maia freezes. “You did?”

Jace nods, slow and slight. “I was patrolling. Late, alone. He came out of nowhere and attacked me, knocked me to the ground. I was on guard, but I wasn’t — I still didn’t expect it. I tried to fend him off but he was strong. Relentless. I managed to get my hand between us, and my blade —” Suddenly his arms surround her, pulling her up and almost against him, just enough space left between them for his fist to press firmly against her stomach. “And —” He draws his knuckles up in a phantom slitting. Even now there’s dried viscera on his skin under the newer blood. “He was half-transformed. He grabbed my shoulder and I felt his nails, deep.”

She understands. She lays her own fingers over the marks hiding under Jace’s borrowed jacket and follows them down, deeper at the ball of his shoulder and fading in intensity as they drag onto his chest. A dying man’s final fuck you. “One of ours?”

“I don’t know.” Jace shakes his head. He looks about to speak, then doesn’t, then does. “You warned me once. Said I should spare the Downworld my charm for a while, so I wouldn’t get hurt. Do you remember?”

It was punishment, then. For the Soul Sword, for the trackers, for years of smug Shadowhunter superiority. Now he’d have a taste of the other side. She wouldn’t even put it past someone in the pack to have done it, not after what they did to Bat.

Maia should say something. He probably thinks he deserves this. She’d thought it was something she had coming to her. But it took her years to be able to really hear that it wasn’t. She’s not sure Jace would hear it right now, either. Instead she sits up into the circle of his arms and hugs him, tight and hard and fast. Then she pulls away. “You’ll feel better after you shower.”

He’s a little taken aback, but his gaze is not as clouded as it was before. Maia turns on the water to let it heat up and for the second time that night they get undressed together without ulterior motives. They step under the spray and stay there until the water goes clear. When the New York grit and the layers of blood are gone, underneath her own coconut soap and the clean blankness of water, she can get a sense of what Jace smells like now. She presses her nose to the back of his neck for just a moment. She had been wrong before; there is still a slight metallic bite to his scent, but now it’s oddly sweet, almost like licorice. Like a spice she tasted one autumn and forgot all about. 

They lay in her bed with the most self-contained of the snacks she’d gotten earlier, Jace in Simon’s abandoned clothes and Maia in her most man-repelling flannel pajamas, damp hair twisted back. “The worst part is,” she says, “When something horrible happens, even when it’s big, it’s still small. Everything changes but nothing changes, because you still have to get up and eat and work so you don’t just lay down on the ground and never get up again.”

He sighs. “Yeah.”

“But,” she continues, “you’re allowed to lay down for a little while. I give you permission. Okay?” 

It’s another attempt to make him smile, but Jace is serious and thoughtful when he looks at her. “You don’t have to do all this for me.” 

“You’re right,” Maia says. “I don’t have to.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone descends to deal with The Jace Problem; Maia's patience is tested.

In the morning, Maia’s small place is full.

She wakes up to an apologetic text from Luke, but she must have slept through the notification because there’s a knock at the door almost as soon as she’s done reading it. Maia is bleary-eyed and bone tired in the way that happens when you don’t sleep right, like the hours of shut-eye you did manage to get passed as quickly as minutes. Jace is already up, sitting on her couch with a cup of coffee. As another knock ruptures the quiet, his expression slides from wariness to resignation. But he made coffee. So that’s good.

With a sound between a groan and a growl, Maia drags herself out of bed. She steals Jace’s mug on her way to the door; it’s a minor fortification. A glance towards the nearest mirror reveals nothing good, but she can’t do anything about it in the next fifteen seconds, so everyone will just have to deal with her PJs and pillow lines. Whatever. All of these people have already seen her naked anyway. 

She only sees Luke when she peers through the peep hole, but there are more than a few leather-clad shoulders and sleeves at the fringes of the fish eye. She drops back onto her heels and turns to Jace, hand on the knob. “Ready?”

He shrugs. His foot taps insistently against the floor. 

Once the door opens, in stream more people than Maia’s little room-and-a-quarter is used to. Luke is first but likely only as a courtesy to her, because Alec and Isabelle surge in quick on his heels. Jace’s mother is right after them, followed by the more restrained trio of Magnus, Clary, and Simon. This is not going to be good.

Jace stands in time to be enveloped by his siblings, lost momentarily in a cloud of black leather and dark hair. But when they give him enough room to breathe, Jace seems more at ease than before, head butting against Alec’s shoulder as his arm wraps around Isabelle. Strangely, Clary stalls halfway from the door to Jace, like she wants to join in but can’t take another step forward. 

Jace’s mother is next in line, anyway. Maia has heard a lot about the formidable Maryse Lightwood, but never actually met her; the woman awkwardly clutching a purse in her living room looks nervous and pleasant, like anyone’s mother except for how singularly beautiful she is. It’s a little tough to reconcile. 

Maryse pets Jace’s hair back from his face, and that — it makes Maia suck in a breath. That little motherly sign of affection makes her chest ache like she’s been kicked. She feels abruptly shitty about half the things she said last night, as though Jace did not have people who loved him already. As though he did not have a family that he was afraid of losing. Maia lost a lot when she turned, but her family was something she’d never quite had.

Simon touches her arm at the elbow, and Maia is grateful that he’s here even if things are still jagged between them. “Crazy, huh?” he says, and the corner of his lips quirks up in an involuntary half-smile that is painfully familiar. “When do I start chanting _‘one of us, one of us’_?”

She smiles. “Maybe later.” Her attention can’t help but pull towards Jace, taking in his dark circles and tight mouth. “Definitely not the Wednesday I had in mind.”

“It’s Thursday now.” His eyes sweep over her in the same way she’d just done to Jace, registering the same the rumpled signs of a rough night. “Do you want me to get you a coffee? You look — well, adorable actually, but like a woman who wants a coffee. Better than Jace, at least, he —” Simon blinks. “Is he wearing my shirt?”

Maia laughs and shoves him towards the kitchen, tells him to make himself useful. Simon was always good at that. He could always put her at ease.

Over on the couch, Isabelle demands, “What happened?” It’s the question of the hour. Jace makes a helpless gesture at his shoulder and she pushes the sleeve of his shirt up until the marks are revealed, stark in the morning light, ravaged. Alec tugs the fabric back down almost impatiently, but the tenor of the room has changed, relief turned back to taut discomfort.

“It was a random attack,” Jace says. Maia watches him try the words out and adopt them in the same moment: comfortably accurate but impressively truncated, something he can say for years and years to come. It was a random attack. It’s decided.

“You can’t know that yet,” Isabelle says. “Remember Kaelie? Those attacks were pretty random at first, too.”

“Wolves attacking without motive is unlikely,” Alec starts, an official note to his voice, like he’s already writing up the report for this. “Do you remember —”

Jace cuts him off. “The person is dead. It’s over.”

“Or just beginning,” Clary says softly. Their eyes lock, sharp. Jace looks away first. 

Then Luke does what he does best: steps into a tense moment and reroutes it, assuring them that the attack will be investigated and taken care of, starting with the pack. Maia’s heard that one before. Luke’s on thin ice already and the pack will not appreciate the spotlight of suspicion being turned on them yet again because one Shadowhunter got hurt. They keep putting band-aids on everything, but they never bother to stop the bleeding. 

Simon returns with fresh coffee as the conversation turns to what they’re going to do with Jace and where he will go. No one even suggests putting him with the pack; instead they try to figure out if Alec can abuse his power as head of the Institute to let a Downworlder live there. But they stumble over that word, _Downworlder_ , as they shuffle things around in their heads, recategorize Jace from _us_ to _them_. They want to hold onto him so badly. 

With an apologetic glance, Alec offers up Magnus’ spare room for Jace’s transitional period, but Isabelle stands firm on the plan to blow up the Institute’s antiquated rules. Maia reminds herself that her apartment is barely big enough for her and she’s a territorial bitch. 

“Nobody wanted me there when they thought I had demon blood,” Jace says finally. “They won’t want me there now. And if I wasn’t a Herondale —” He stops. “Has someone told her?”

A tightness ripples across the faces of his family, making it immediately clear what his grandmother’s reaction had been. Isabelle, trying to salvage it, says, “She’ll come around.”

Jace gives an aborted, sarcastic little laugh. “Will I?”

Maia almost steps forward, _almost_. Her mind is full of mirror shards and the sight of Jace on his knees in the alley last night, seething. That same wild anger is on his face now, but he searches her out like he needs someone to keep him still. And it works, somehow. In one exchanged look, quick in a tiny crowd of eager faces, something settles into place and Jace calms down. 

Maia does not. 

He’s a new puppy, that’s all. She has been his touchstone for twenty-four hours. His world has been rendered strange, and now all the familiar things chafe; as a result, her familiarity is grounding. That’s all. 

Clary, standing in the space between them, follows Jace’s sightline to Maia and then gives her a warm, uncertain smile. _Thank you_ , she mouths. Maia shrugs, uncomfortable. 

“You belong with us,” Isabelle insists. “We’re not going to be like Cleophas and Amatis. You know that, Jace. Nothing has to change.”

It’s boldly false, which everyone knows and no one says. None of them are touching anymore. Jace has pulled his arms around himself, and Alec’s fingertips press distractedly at a spot on his own side like it’s sore. “Alexander,” Magnus says softly. Alec stirs and stands, goes to him. Isabelle flounders, finally out of things to say. 

Hesitantly, Simon ventures, “Look, it took me a long time to get it, but you can’t go home again. Even if you try, you’re not going to fit the same way you used to. You can try to make Jace move back into his old bedroom or whatever, but it’s never going to be the same.”

Jace finds Maia again. His bones have already reshaped themselves. His body became something else overnight, though it wouldn’t be the first time that happened to him. Still, he learned fast, like they all do. He knows. “I’m not sleeping in a canoe.” 

Simon smiles wryly. “Wouldn’t dream of suggesting it. All I’m saying is, I’ve been there. _We’ve_ been there. At least four people in this room have a pretty solid idea of what you’re going through.”

“Four and a half,” Maryse quips. She takes Jace’s hand, full of a strange bright hope. “I thought you might come stay with me. Or we can find somewhere bigger, if you need more space.”

“Mom,” Alec says.

She waves dismissively. “Robert is footing the bill either way.”

“I’m not a dog you’re trying to find a new home for,” Jace tells her.

“No,” Maryse says. “You’re my son.”

Jace’s sealed-off expression cracks open and something almost tremulous spills out. And Maia, who has hung back and kept her mouth shut because this isn’t her goddamn business, cannot stop herself from saying, “Don’t cry about it, Wayland. Go home with your mom.”

It’s about sixteen shades too mean but after everything else she’s tried, it’s the thing that makes Jace smile at her with a touch of that old bullshit charm. “Permission?”

She shakes her head. “It’s an order.”

Maryse looks at Maia properly for the first time, intrigued. And she’s not the only one. Like a little stone plinking into the placid surface of a lake, their exchange has sent ripples of weirdness through the room. Maia can feel the curious side-eye but doesn’t indulge in it, instead holding Jace’s gaze for another breath until he turns away to give Maryse the accepting nod she so clearly wants. And that’s it, it’s decided: a middle ground between before and after, not who he used to be or who he is now. Purgatory.

“Cool,” Maia says. “Now can everyone get out of my apartment?”

She’s tired. She looks and feels like shit. She was up half the night and had her apartment invaded first thing in the morning. She hasn’t even brushed her teeth, not that she could, because her toothbrush has glass in it. Her patience has hit its limit. She’s done.

But she’s not surprised when only the Shadowhunter contingent makes a move to depart. Alec kisses Magnus goodbye and goes to wait by the door; Isabelle rises with a sigh, brow knit conflictedly, and collects Clary on her way to join him. But Jace comes directly to Maia and takes her hand in both of his. _What the fuck_ , she thinks, and then again, louder, _WHAT THE FUCK_ , when Jace brings her hand to his mouth. A kiss on the knuckles would have been embarrassing enough, but he turns her hand over and kisses her palm, cheek briefly nestled against her cupped fingers. It’s too intimate to do in front of other people. It’s too corny to do, full stop. What is wrong with him?

Maia waits until he lets her go to say, “You owe me a mirror.”

“Owe you a lot more than that.” 

She shrugs, disgruntled. “Do I have to tell you to go home a third time?” But when he turns to go she grabs him hard by the sleeve, tries to impart something significant without saying anything. Jace nods a little, and then he goes, and then he is gone.

Maia’s life is so fucking weird sometimes.

“So,” she says, collapsing onto the couch, “Is this when the second half of the interrogation begins? Call up a Seelie and we’d have a real tête-à-tête on our hands.”

“This is a friendly chat,” Simon says brightly. “I don’t represent all vampires. If Raphael thought I did, he’d probably cement-shoe me and drop me in the East River.” 

Maia snorts, but says, “It’s pointless to have a conversation about Jace without Jace.”

“I have the feeling I’m going to get more information out of you than him,” Luke says, dry but a little apologetic too. 

“Sure, but it’s not my business to tell,” Maia points out. “If Jace isn’t ready to talk about it, then you wait. How long was it until I could tell you about Jordan?”

Simon sinks into the seat next to her, something guilty in the set of his mouth. She doesn’t know whether that makes her feel better or bothers her. 

“That’s different,” Luke says. “If wolves are out there attacking Shadowhunters — and I don’t for one second believe this was random — then it’s _my_ business. Which makes it the whole pack’s business. This affects all of us.”

“Not just,” Magnus remarks. “In years past, we used to — how do I put this delicately? — handle things like this internally. That won’t be the case with Jace.”

Maia thinks of his family surging inside like they owned the place with nary a word to her. They were anxious, of course; scared. But even so. “They have a way of taking over, don’t they?”

Upon arriving, Magnus had immediately busied himself with Maia’s rack of clothes, perusing the items with interest and making soft exclamations whenever he found something he liked. (She appreciated the appreciation, and the fact that he treated the referendum over Jace’s soul like it was Sunday brunch.) He stands there still, disconcertingly opulent against the outfits, and surveys her with the same keen concern as Simon. “If you can imagine, they used to be worse. Like little kings. They always felt ordained.”

“Even when they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Especially then, I think.” Magnus shoots her a smile, but there’s a little flicker on his face, mask slipping briefly to reveal something too complicated to analyze. His focus shifts to Luke, whose arms are firmly crossed. “You disagree?”

Luke sighs. “They’re trying to do right by their family.”

“I know,” Magnus says. “It can be both.”

“It’s good for them to be involved, isn’t it?” Simon wonders. “Like, regardless of why. We all know what it’s like to lose everything. If they’re here for him…it’s good? Even if they don’t really get it.” 

Smoothly, Magnus says, “Of course. But…” He shrugs.

“Shadowhunters are different,” Maia supplies. “Don’t look at me like that, Luke. They are.”

“And they will likely want someone held accountable for this,” Magnus adds.

“Someone has been,” Maia says. “Jace killed the guy who did this to him.”

Simon blew out a breath. “Jesus.” 

A part of her finds it absurd to be obsessing over one person’s bad luck when tragedy is the one thing all Downworlders have in common, but Maia gets it all the same. It’s complicated, politically. Because Jace is a Shadowhunter and a Herondale, Valentine’s experiment and the Inquisitor’s grandson. He can’t shake off his old life like they all had to and submerge himself in a new one. He has to tightrope between them. 

“We all heard stories about it, growing up,” Luke admits. “Newborn Shadowhunters being taken as changelings; older ones being turned into vampires or wolves. I’m sure it was mostly horror stories, propaganda, but —”

“I don’t think Jace deserved this,” Maia says. “But people have good reason to be angry.”

“And the Shadowhunters will take advantage of that anger, as they often have,” Magnus says, adding cheerfully, “It’s amazing how repetitive being alive is, isn’t it? And I do mean amazing. I’m always willing to be surprised, and yet I rarely am.” 

With a laugh that is at least half a groan, Maia drops her head into her hands. Simon rubs her back. “This is exhausting, it’s giving me a headache,” she says. “And I have a shift later, so everyone needs to get the hell out, for real this time. We can hold Jace debates after I’ve had a full night’s sleep.”

She’s finally said it enough for everyone to vacate her apartment, though she knows the conversation isn’t over — especially with Luke. He can do all the sighing and square-shouldered cop posturing he likes, but there’s an ache in his eyes that proves he’s taking this whole thing very, very personally. Simon may think he owes Jace something because of the blood, or else he’s trying to pay it forward. Magnus is looking out for Alec, and for the rest of them. The stakes are different for Luke.

And for Maia, apparently, though it’s not something she lets herself think about. 

On his way out the door, Simon says, “So, uh, you and Jace?”

“You and Clary?” Maia says pointedly. “You and _Izzy_?”

Cowed, he says, “Well, I think he’s lucky to have you looking out for him right now,” which is the most Simon thing he could say.

She gets Magnus to magic away the rest of the glass in the bathroom before he leaves and then she immediately crashes for a nap; afterwards she gets ready for work and heads off to sling beers. She does _not_ check her phone every forty-five seconds to see if there are any updates awaiting her, not that it’s _anyone’s business_ if she checks it at all. 

She gets plenty of messages, but none of them are from Jace.

She’s decided to let it go by closing time, after angrily buffing every surface and sending more than a few glasses clattering. She was useful and then she wasn’t, which is the story of her life lately. She really misses the time before she ever met Jace Wayland. Herondale. Whatever.

But as soon as she steps out into the back alley, hands scrubbed raw and frustration scrubbed out, she smells licorice. And there he is, still wearing the same old band tee, his hair all fucked up from sleeping on it wet. 

“I want to run,” Jace says. “You up for it?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jace traces a blank space on his left side. “We’re not parabatai anymore,” he says quietly. “Alec and me.”

There aren’t many places for a wolf to run in New York City.

Even the parks are packed with people. More than once Maia has tried threading through the trees of Central Park only for some well-meaning mundane to think someone’s designer-breed dog had gotten loose. But it’s late enough, well after three in the morning because she worked until closing, and Brooklyn feels sleepier after hours than it used to. So Maia and Jace make their way to Prospect Park and tuck their clothes into a small box kept hidden in the shrubbery for this very purpose. Then they run. 

Maia hasn’t done this in a long time — turned just for the experience of it, to feel the earth under her paws and breathe in the night air. Her last series of transformations were traumatic, triggered by the tight whirling of feeling in her chest. She turned to defend against attack, physical or emotional. She let the wolf wrap her in its protection. It always hurt, but she had forgotten until now that it could feel good, too. 

She’s not sure if Jace has found that knife edge yet. For a moment before it begins she thinks he’s going to throw up, which wouldn’t be unusual, but he gets through it, drops down to the earth on four legs. It’s strange how easy something can be when you have no choice.

Maia makes them stick to the trees as they lope off, forsaking paths still thick with the scent of human visitors. She nips just above the thick ruff of fur at his neck and then takes off, a burst of speed leading her across asphalt and into a stretch of green. He’s at her heels in no time, never one to turn down friendly competition. Or any competition. She tests him as they race, makes him dodge branches and bushes, leap over roots. He doesn’t stumble. She hadn’t expected him to. 

They slow once they reach the edge of the lake and pick their way carefully around its perimeter, startling some geese as they go. It doesn’t ever feel like they’re not in Brooklyn, even with the ducks and the water lapping gently against rocks, even with the fragrant grass and crumbling earth. There are still apartment buildings visible beyond the trees. The sound of cars sings in Maia’s ears. All of New York has a metallic smell, the sour mix of millions of scents swirled together. 

This may have been his idea, but Jace seems maudlin. His tail droops and his paws are heavy as he plods along. Maia bounds over and catches one of his ears in her teeth, but soft, the way she and Gretel used to give each other shit as wolves. She hasn’t done this since Gretel. 

They spill onto a stretch of grass and half-trampled flora, catching themselves with human hands, shedding fur as they go. They lie on their backs with arms folded behind their heads, looking up at a blank, starless sky. 

“Lot of nudity involved in being a werewolf,” Jace notes.

Maia snorts. “Get used to it. And buy doubles of every outfit you really like.”

“I’ll start collecting all these tips for your upcoming _Guide to Being a Newborn Werewolf_.”

She had never actually seen Jace naked before the other night. They’d hooked up a couple of times but never in a bed, never at home; always skirts peeled up in hidden nooks, belts unbuckled. Enough skin bared to reveal a secret tattoo. She was used to finding runes on him everywhere she looked — etched into his stomach, scrawled on his hip when she jerked his fly down once, patterning all his bare flesh. He was branded everywhere. 

She may have gotten a better look at him recently but she’s still startled when she turns and sees him stretched out, rune-free. He seems more naked than naked. 

Jace catches her looking and raises both his eyebrows, smiling a little. Maia rolls her eyes but feels caught anyway. _That_ wasn’t the reason she was paying his body particular attention, but she’d always liked the look of him. Even when she was scenting his blood through the city so she could rip his throat out with her teeth. Sue her.

But, “No,” she says, “I was just thinking — your runes.”

His amusement fades. He touches an empty spot on his neck. “This was for heightened speed,” he says, and on his forearm, “to increase strength,” and on his chest to make him soundless, on his side to heal shallow wounds. Runes to keep him steady and make him strike true. All designed to turn him into the best little solider he could be. All these patches of skin where there is nothing now. 

Then Jace traces a blank space on his left side. “We’re not parabatai anymore,” he says quietly. “Alec and me.” 

“Oh,” Maia says, stomach sinking with another thing she had not considered. “I don’t really know what that means.”

Jace mulls it over for a moment to find the best way to explain the inexplicable to a person who has no point of reference. “It means I was never alone.”

Maia thinks, _everyone’s alone_. Pack means someone is always there for her to call on, but she’s still on her own. 

“Alec was the first home I ever had,” Jace says. “And I knew I wasn’t really his brother. There was nothing to stop him from getting sick of me or giving up on me or just deciding I wasn’t worth it.”

“So you decided to get soul-bonded as a tween just to stop your friend from ditching you?”

“Something like that.”

“Well.” Maia sits up, brushing the grass from her arms before she wraps them around her knees, rests her cheek there and looks at him. “If you ask me, anyone who would agree to get soul-bonded probably isn’t going to cut and run as soon as the going gets tough. Even if you don’t have your cutesy matching tattoos anymore.”

Jace shakes his head. “No, but people drift.”

He seems young to her right then: a boy who never dealt with messy high school drama or stressing about a best friend moving away. Unprepared for the mundanity of loss. “You and Alec are not going to drift apart.”

He sits up, too. “But —”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not,” he says, frustrated. “You don’t get it, it’s like — like someone reached inside me and hollowed me out.”

Maia wonders why, with an entire Jace Wayland fan club ready to descend on innocent apartments at a moment’s notice, he came to find her tonight. Surely Alec would be the one to talk to — the person feeling that same echoing inside. Or Luke, a wolf who lost his parabatai, too. She has no tools to tape this together for Jace, no words of comfort. 

“I forgot what it’s like,” Jace says. “To be in my head. Just me.” 

Maia shifts over and puts her arm around him, blades of grass tickling her skin. “You’re a mess, Wayland,” she tells him. “I’ve met messes. But you take it to the next level.”

His laugh has a bubbling, thick sound like a blocked sink. He rubs his hand over his wet eyes. “Gee, thanks.”

Maia wants to lean in and kiss him, wherever’s closest. His neck. The right angle of his jaw below his ear. She doesn’t. She pulls away and stands. “Let’s head back. We hang out any longer, we’re going to get arrested for public indecency.”

His eyes travel over her, up her legs and hips and stomach and tits. She doesn’t mind it. “Worth it,” he says, and she kicks dirt at him just because she can. 

They turn, run back the way they came. Maia lets Jace think he’s winning the race for a cool thirty seconds before she pounces on him, sends them into the underbrush in a tangle of legs and tails. Before he can even figure out how to get back on four feet, she’s off again, can almost feel him thinking _cheater_. 

He picks that up too, ever adaptable. But he’s still clumsy like this. She sidesteps his snapping teeth and evades his attempts to knock her off course, keeps him so busy trying to sabotage her that he seems to forget they’re racing at all. She gets back first, paws on the box where their clothes are, nose lowered to the ground playfully. When he growls in exasperation, she wants to laugh — if she could laugh in this form. Her tail whips back and forth. 

His eyes flash, bright in the dark, and then he’s rippling back into the Jace she half-knows. Maia follows suit, smirking triumphantly. 

“Yeah, yeah, congrats,” he says. “You’re the first person to beat me in a race.”

Maia mimes a curtsey. He laughs. “I had to put you out of your misery. It was getting a little too ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight.’” He gives her a weird look, so she adds, “Shut up, it’s from _The Lion King_.”

That evidently does not clear up his confusion so Maia just throws his clothes at him instead of trying to talk out the finer points of lion _Hamlet_. 

“Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?”

Maia tilts her head inquisitively as she zips up her jeans. “Why?”

She notices then that he’s a little sheepish. “My mom wants to meet you. ‘Properly.’ She told me to invite you over. Lunch or dinner, whatever.”

“I’m being _summoned_ to the new Lightwoodale _pied-à-terre_?”

Awkward is an interesting color on Jace. He can’t make it cute like Simon can, so it’s itchy and ill-fitting. “She’s trying. Just do me a favor.”

“Oh, because I never do those for you.”

Jace smiles, the flashy one that’s supposed to distract her. “Just do me another favor.” 

Maia has invited herself to family dinners, but she has never been summoned. “Do I have to wear a nice dress?”

“You can wear whatever you want,” Jace says. “You can wear rhinestones and feathers if you want. Actually, please do that, I would love to see it.”

She punches his arm. When she looks up at him, she thinks — hopes — she can see some relief there. “You know, when you’re a wolf, your eyes are gold.”

Jace is surprised. “Oh. Is that weird?”

Maia nods. “Par for the course for you, then.”

He rolls his eyes, not even gilded now, and nudges her back out onto the street.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s probably not good brunch manners to follow up _I tried to kill your son_ with _and then I fucked him_. 
> 
> Maia and Luke visit with Maryse and Jace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year, fam! <3

Maia wears a nice dress.

Not too nice, though. It’s sleeveless black denim with buttons from neckline to hem. She tries to soften it with an old cream cardigan from high school and nondescript flat ankle boots, a choker with a delicate charm and rosy lip gloss. She could make it cute like a girl in an _Anthropologie_ catalogue. But too soft feels like a costume, like playing pretend for the Lewises or dressing up like a good girl for her family all those years ago. Maia is not soft. She can’t make herself malleable. She changes her boots. 

Maryse Lightwood doesn’t live far from the Institute, which tracks. She’s got a place just north of Washington Square Park (as in, Maia crosses the street from the park to the door) in an old red brick building. The sight of it makes Maia kind of hysterically furious, like she could drop right to the ground with wild laughter. Maybe she should have worn pearls. 

( _How_ do _Shadowhunters make so much money?_ she wonders, and then her brain quietly answers, _You know how_.)

Jace answers the door. Maia gets one look at the place over his shoulder while she’s pulling him in for a hug and says, “Fuck you, rich boy.”

He laughs. “Lucky me, they allow pets.” 

“Ha, ha,” she says dryly, pushing him back so she can get a look at him. He’s almost comically covered up in a thick white turtleneck with sleeves that fall to his knuckles. It makes him especially blond. “You look like a ski instructor in a Mary Kate and Ashley movie.” 

“You can take the girl out of the bar, but she still decimates your self-esteem.”

“Don’t worry, you’ve got enough to spare.”

The apartment really is obnoxious. There are vaulted ceilings and _beams_ , three large picture windows against one wall that send sunlight spilling over the table and its luxurious brunch spread. There’s a loft space. Literally: sectioned off by wrought iron railing, Maia can just see the arm of a couch in a _second floor_ sitting room. “What a struggle living here must be for you.”

Jace gives her an exasperated look, but before he can offer an argument just for the sake of it, Maryse rounds the corner with a silver carafe in her hands. “I thought I heard the door,” she says pleasantly. As though counterpoint to Jace, Maryse has put on a sleeveless blouse that shows off the lack of runes covering her skin. “Is Lucian — Luke — with you?”

Under her breath, Maia says, “You didn’t tell me your mom was a werewolf groupie,” and Jace elbows her. 

“Still on his way,” he says. 

“That’s alright.” Maryse smiles. “I can get to know Maia.” 

“Why do I feel like I’m about to be your date to the prom?” Maia mutters, but Jace only shakes his head, amused, and gives her a push towards the table. 

One of the first pieces of advice Maia received when she joined the pack was _don’t run on the wrong side of a Lightwood_. She barely knew anything about Downworlder politics or Shadowhunter-enforced Accords; she’d never even heard of the Circle or its leader. But the other wolves made sure she knew that much. Marcel, who’d been in the pack since the eighties, said that the Lightwoods were without loyalty, that they would turn traitor just to save their own skins. There were few insults worse to a wolf than _disloyal_. 

Maia doesn’t know how to apply what she’s heard to the woman sitting opposite her at the small table. Maryse still has that mild smile on her face, almost indulgent, like someone switched her out with a Stepford model. Had she once rained destruction on Downworlders with the excuse of trying to make a better world?

She offers Maia a dish of warm croissants, then folds her undecorated hands casually in front of her. “Luke speaks very highly of you,” she says, leaning forward. “Jace, too.”

“I am pretty cool,” Maia says, like an asshole.

Maryse’s lips quirk. “How did you and Jace meet?”

“Uh…” Maia’s gaze slides sideways but Jace is too busy enjoying this to be of any help. (It’s not bad, though, to see him smile in a way that is not grim or flashy or fake.) “I may have tried to kill him.”

“To be fair, you thought I’d killed your friend. And you did give me a free beer before that. That was nice.”

“You were very pitiful. And damp.”

“Well, I’d almost drowned in New York Harbor.”

“Isn’t that like a Tuesday for you? You always _almost_ something. Almost drowned, almost murdered, almost —"

“Hey,” he says, and taps his shoulder. “I followed through on this one, didn’t I?”

Maia flicks his other, unmarked shoulder — the one closest to her. “ _Not_ funny.”

Maryse has followed their back and forth with the same intrigued look on her face she had the other day. Maia thinks of Simon saying _you and Jace, huh?_ And it makes her feel like she has to spit on his croissant or something, just to get people off the scent. 

“I didn’t think Jace had many friends outside the Institute,” Maryse says.

It’s probably not good brunch manners to follow up _I tried to kill your son_ with _and then I fucked him_. “Or any friends at all,” Maia jokes.

“She’s only this mean to me around other people,” Jace says. “She doesn’t want anyone to know she likes me.”

There’s that hysterical feeling again. “I don’t want you to die, I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”

“Close enough.”

Maryse leans back in her chair now, her posture loose but posed, wrists crossed in her lap. “We kept you kids so isolated,” she muses. “But you all found your way out in the end, didn’t you?”

Jace’s brow furrows. “Mom?”

“It’s a good thing, I’m glad. I’m glad you aren’t alone.” Maryse touches his hand, half-submerged beneath that stupid sweater. “I have a brother, you know?” This she directs at Maia, though the confusion in Jace’s expression doesn’t dissipate. “He left when I was still very young. He gave up his runes and married a mundane woman and I never saw him again. I couldn’t imagine anything more awful than that when I was young. Being cut off from your family, from your power. To have to live like all those people I looked down on.” She turns her arms over, displays them. “I thought I would feel adrift without all of it. But I think for the first time in my life I feel free.”

“Mom,” Jace says.

“I’m not saying that’s how _you_ need to feel about it,” Maryse tells him. “But when you think of everything you’re giving up, think of everything you’re getting, too.” 

He opens his mouth to say something but the door buzzes, cutting him off.

“Oh, that must be Lucian.” Maryse stands. “I’ll go get him.” 

When she’s gone, Jace and Maia look at each other, and eventually she shrugs. “It’s always weird when you find out your parents are people.”

He tilts his head, curious. “Are your —” But he cuts himself off. “Sorry, I don’t mean to pry.”

And maybe that’s why Maia offers up, “We’re estranged.” The corner of her mouth curls contradictorily. “I found out too soon who they were.”

She’s not sure what she expects, but it’s not this: Jace mirrors her odd little smile and says, “Orphans.” 

Before Maia can respond, Maryse returns with Luke and previous conversations are forgotten. Luke has a way of filling the room with his energy, an easygoing charisma that has, very clearly, attracted Maryse’s attention. It’s kind of normal, passing around dishes and catching up on trivial things — if these four people at this particular table could ever be normal. It occurs to Maia that no one here is a Shadowhunter anymore. 

Luke tells them about absurd run-ins he had at work, makes them laugh; Maryse reveals that she got a job as a personal trainer and has already made three women cry; Maia delights with an anecdote about a very public Seelie proposal at the bar that went horribly awry the other night. The night Jace turned, as a matter of fact. How quickly things can change.

When Maryse asks about Maia, Jace says she’s the meanest bartender at the Hunter’s Moon who makes the best drinks. No one says Maia is a mixologist when she is not, to try and make her sound better than she is.

Later, crumbs on their plates and drinks drained, Jace remarks to Maryse, “We never did stuff like this when I was growing up.” 

She smiles, sad. “We’re doing it now.”

Maia has moments, like right now, where she wonders if she could ever patch things up with her parents. If she could ever make up for lost time by investing her effort in a bright new future; if she could forgive them for not loving her enough. Maybe they loved her as much as they were capable of. Maybe they had more to give to Daniel — because he was first, because he was a boy, because he could pretend better than she could. Simon’s mom once told her that her parents still loved her, with the complete authority of someone who had no idea what she was talking about. When you come from a family filled with love, it must be impossible to imagine that other people don’t have any. 

Maia doesn’t realize how long she’s been lost in thought until she notices Jace has placed a strawberry in the center of her empty plate. Just one, single and shockingly red. When she meets his eyes, he winks. Like a real loser. And something inside Maia contracts tightly. 

As the conversation winds down — or, more accurately, Maryse starts leaning towards Luke’s side of the table so enthusiastically that she might fall out of her chair — Jace nudges Maia’s boot under the table. “I’ll walk you down,” he says, head tipping slightly towards his mom. 

Maia gets it: _let’s leave them alone_. 

He does walk her down to the door of the building, but then they sit on the steps, watching the people coming and going in the park with their dogs. “She likes you,” Jace says, though Maia had not asked. “You’re tough.”

“Does she think I’m your girlfriend?”

“Probably. But I told her we were friends.”

Friends. She’s kind of low on those, lately. “And I’m your werewolf mentor, obviously.”

Jace smiles. “Obviously. Am I gonna have to fight that other new kid for your attention?”

She’s surprised that he remembered Bat. “Yep. I’m going to start ignoring you the first chance I get.”

That does get her thinking, though. There’s time for brunches and bonding with mom, but if Jace is going to live in this city, then he’s going to have to get to know the rest of the pack. And that’s not going to go without a scuffle or two. 

How does he fight now? Does he know how to handle how much stronger and faster he is? Does his body remember how to move now that there’s something else inhabiting it?

“I’m not staying,” Jace says, and Maia stills. “I mean, I will, for a little while. But I can’t hole up in this apartment.”

She thought he’d meant — she brushes that off. “Your mom’ll be disappointed.” 

He shakes his head. “She gets it, I think.”

“Well, she is a total werewolf groupie, so I’m sure she’s very supportive.”

Jace jostles her, like, _cool it_. 

“Where are you going to go?” If he’s resistant to the docks, there’s always Luke’s place. Someone’s couch to crash on. 

Jace is looking skirty again. “Simon needs a new roommate, apparently.” 

It’s like someone threw salt in her sugar. But Maia’s expression doesn’t change, though she can feel her jaw become inflexible, her mouth set. No one told her Jordan left town — if Jordan did leave town. Maybe Simon’s the one who decided to step out on the most nerd-perfect apartment in New York. “Oh yeah?”

Almost rueful, “Since everything, he’s been texting me nonstop. All these…like, inspirational sayings and gifs. I think he feels like he owes me, because —” He stops. “Because.”

Maia’s not going to unpeel whatever weird stuff has gone on in their relationship. “Why does he only want to live with men I’ve had sex with?”

“Threesome?” Jace suggests without missing a beat, and Maia wants to kick him for making her laugh when she’s so annoyed. 

“Really roundabout scheme, so — classic Simon,” she surmises. “You’ll kill each other.”

“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” he says wryly. The silence stretches so he tries to fill it, rambling about how the Institute is providing him with a stipend, as they do for all “retired” Shadowhunters (though she’s sure his siblings had a hand in that). But he wants to get a real job. Luke is pushing for the police academy, but Jace thinks he can coast for a little while until he decides. Rich white boy finds a way: what a shocking turn in the story.

“You’ve been planning a lot,” Maia notes. She wonders when that happened; it’s only been a few days. And it happened behind the scenes, in between the glass and the night sky, without her knowing. It’s not her business to know. She shouldn’t care. “You could have stayed in bed for a week and no one would hold it against you.”

“I have to do something,” Jace says with a shrug. He only knows how to do things; how to push through and push on, ignore pain and keep fighting. “You said — that night, you said to me that everything changes but nothing changes. Fucked up things are big and small at the same time. Even being here for, what, less than two days?” He points up at the building. “I feel like someone packed me away in a box for safekeeping. I feel like I’m going to claw myself out of my skin. I have to — I have to figure out how I fit now.”

“So out of the nest, then, huh?” She surveys him. “You know, you may feel like you can handle it now, but you’re still in shock. You’re going to change sometimes when you don’t mean to. Also, mood swings? Get ready to make friends. You’re gonna get _hungry_. You’re going to be horny as fuck. You’re going to be angry, you’ll have a hair trigger. Every little thing can be ten times as dangerous to a new Downworlder.”

Jace only smiles at her. “I know how to hurt,” he says, and, god. She would throttle him if she could even find his throat under that turtleneck. 

At least she can trust Simon to take care of him.

“Yeah, well don’t do anything stupid. _Too_ fucking stupid.” She knocks her shoulder into his, a less playful nudge than the one he’d given her before. She gets up and faces him sitting there, looking up at her, early afternoon light on his worn-out face. So covered up you can’t tell what he is, or isn’t. She reaches out to tug at the sweater’s thick collar. “Got it, Sven?”

“No promises.” He shifts forward a little and puts his hands on her hips, brings her swaying towards him. “You’re not really going to start ignoring me, are you?”

Her scoff is a laugh too, but whatever it is, it gets muffled when Jace pulls her down and kisses her. It’s on purpose but it feels like an accident, and Maia shifts back almost as soon as they’ve touched. She pushes him away. More of a chuckle, now. “No way, baby wolf.”

“No?” he says, rakish. Her forehead against his, nose against his cheek, that smell of his skin she can almost taste. 

“No,” Maia confirms, stepping down onto the sidewalk. 

“Okay.” Jace watches her. “No it is, then.”

She lets his gaze saturate her, lets herself steep in it. She shifts her weight, foot to foot, hip to hip. “If you want something while you figure it all out… You can pick up some shifts at the bar. If you want. Just lost someone to the Hardtail, so we need the coverage.” 

“Really?”

“Really. Come join the exciting world of drunk faeries and vampire hipsters. You’ll realize what’s been missing all your life.”

Jace smiles and it’s the one she likes, the one that barely looks like anything but means a lot more. “I bet.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Downworlders may have gotten the memo that Jace Herondale is one of them now, but they don’t welcome him with open arms. Far from it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting! Life kind of took a bite out of me.

It was a mistake to invite Jace behind the bar. 

Not that Maia is surprised. He’s almost always late and he’s got a bullshit attitude for someone who’s been done a favor. He mutters sullenly when he has to wash out glasses and never pokes the broom into the corners when he sweeps. He’s not good at doing math in his head and holds up customers when it’s time for them to cash out. Which is great, because everyone already hates him. Downworlders may have gotten the memo that Jace Herondale is one of them now, but they don’t welcome him with open arms. Far from it. 

During every shift, there are at least a few people who tell Jace he got what he deserved. Maia sees it: the casual disgust that curls their lips, anger glittering in their eyes. They probably would have preferred he was dead. And Jace couldn’t keep his temper even when he wasn’t running hot with werewolf hormones; more than once he gets so close to starting a fight with a customer that Maia has to stomp over and break it up. “You want to get thrown out?” she demands of the customer, before rounding on Jace. “ _You_ wanna get fired?”

But she doesn’t fire him. And she probably would, if he were anyone else.

The only thing Jace has going for him is that he wears an apron folded and tied low on his hips. It draws Maia’s eye to the flat line of his stomach, revealed whenever he lifts his arm and pulls the hem of his shirt up with it. Stupid apron highlights the ratio of shoulder to hip, frames his ass every time he leans up against the bar to set down a glass. 

Being stuck behind the bar with Jace is another mistake. The space is just too small. There’s nowhere to turn without knocking into him and they’re always weaving around each other, getting in the way. His hands rest lightly on her hips every time he squeezes past her, murmuring a respectful _sorry_ even as he trades surly glares with one of the patrons. Always touching her just enough, and never thinking twice about it.

It’s been a week since the brunch. His siblings come by a lot; Maia steers clear. Jace hasn’t yet helped himself to Simon’s spare room but an unintentional game of telephone gave her an update on Jordan: Simon told Jace to tell her that Jordan left because his assignment was complete, but there was no way of knowing where he went. Jordan didn’t say. He might not even be in New York anymore, but Maia’s never been that lucky so she’s not banking on it. 

“No rags on the counter,” Maia scolds as she steps around Jace, snatching the dishtowel from where he’d dropped it on bar’s surface. It’s one of many reminders she gives him daily. Clean the shakers right away. Never scoop ice with the glass. Don’t pick up glasses by the rim, leave smudgy fingerprints where someone will put their mouth. He never puts the bottles back where he found them, either; Maia grabs for tequila on muscle memory only to find the vodka bottle’s in its place. She downs the ruined cocktail in one go and informs Jace that it’s coming out of his paycheck. He always fucks up the simplest of things, like maybe he was the one raised by wolves instead of her.

At first he handles her sniping and scolding with wry smiles, then shakes his head, then stares at her blankly, then starts to frown. But she can’t stop. When she snaps, “Corners!” at him while he’s sweeping, the broom handle fractures in his hands, split in two. He looks down at it, startled by his own strength.

“Well,” Maia says. “That’s tame by some displays of temper I’ve seen.”

She’s not sure what it is, but it almost feels like his newness is infiltrating her. She can see the way he makes himself touch things carefully so he doesn’t break them, and she remembers all the glasses she shattered by accident the first month after she turned. She finds him in the alley out back on his break with a weighty fast food bag spotted with grease, devouring foiled-wrapped burger after foiled-wrapped burger. Her stomach burns with that fathomless hunger. After it happened and she was released from the hospital, neck bandaged stiff, she would sneak down into the kitchen and sit in front of the open fridge, eating and eating. That’s what it’s like. It takes over every part of your life. Hers before; his now; hers again. 

She’s about to smack a misplaced lime wedge out of his hand when she makes herself take three deep breaths like Luke taught her, way back when. “How are you doing?” she asks, measured and matter-of-fact. She replaces the lime he’s holding with lemon, earning a look both grateful and wary.

“Fine.” He puts his hands down on the counter, flat with fingers spread. A tremor crawls up his wrist but he straightens, stamps it down, stops it before it starts. He amends, “I feel it.”

“The moon’s getting close, that can’t be helping.” She’s about to say more, but there’s a customer waiting and he’s getting impatient. The warlock (judging by the slight iridescence of snakeskin on his arms) snaps his fingers for Jace’s attention, a none-too-polite plea to hurry it the fuck up.

“I’ll just,” Jace says, gesturing, and picks up the glass — remembers not to grab it at the top at the last minute. Maia shakes her head, wants to smile.

But her amusement is wiped out five minutes later when the warlock flicks his wrist and sends the contents of the glass cascading over Jace’s head. It’s fast: dripping and furious, Jace’s eyes flash gold; he hauls the man up out of his chair by the lapels of his jacket; the entire room falls pin-drop silent; and Maia races around the bar to pull Jace back by the arm.

“One, two, three,” she says, unthinking, as she pries his fingers from the coat. “Deep breaths.” 

Jace turns towards her, momentarily unseeing until he locks eyes with her. He takes a breath and lets go, but growls out a low, “Fuck you,” to the warlock while he’s doing it. Then he stalks past Maia towards the back of the bar, where the bathrooms are.

The customer is clearly affronted, but all Maia can say is, “Well, don’t throw fucking drinks at people,” before she follows Jace back. 

She finds him standing at the mirror, grumpy as he studies his wet hair and stained sweater. “I guess he really wanted that lime,” he says ruefully and, despite herself, she laughs.

“I think you just have one of those faces,” she tells him. “Come on, I’ll help you get the booze out of your hair, princess.”

Annoyingly, he looks hot: wet hair in his face, chest heaving with barely-controlled anger. It’s a look, and a familiar one on Jace. But anger means something different now. It could have gone very badly out there, very easily. But it hadn’t and he’s okay, or as close to it as he can get anymore. 

He pulls the sweater over his head but he’s wearing a t-shirt underneath, to Maia’s disappointment. She drags a chair over to the sink and he straddles it so she can rinse his hair out, leaning against his warm back as he bends forward. She feels over the skeletal shape of his scalp, the buzzed hair at the nape of his neck. Longer strands tangle in her fingers. She promises him she won’t wash his hair with bathroom hand soap but then does it anyway. R.I.P. his conditioning routine.

They rearrange themselves. Jace sits properly and leans his head back under the badly-positioned tap, his eyes closed like he’s at a spa or something. A problem. When Maia steps closer, she’s basically astride his thigh; she rests her knee on the seat on the chair, pressed against the inseam of his jeans. She wants to drop right into his lap, open his mouth with hers and rub off against the denim. She doesn’t, but Jace puts his hands on her hips again and her body reacts right away, her pulse drumming. She’s glad he can’t hear it, like vampires can; sometimes she thinks Simon was so good in bed because he could hear it every time her heart beat faster. But Jace can probably smell the interest on her, like she can on him. 

“There you go.” She brushes wet fingertips over his eyebrows. “Now you don’t smell like a tacky martini anymore.”

Jace looks at her, suddenly soft-lidded and soothed. “Yeah, smelling like a bar bathroom is much better.” 

Maia flicks water at him and extricates herself, because the bar has been neglected long enough. She tells him to take his fifteen before she goes to clean up any messes that have arisen in her absence. Luckily, maybe thanks to the show Jace put on, everyone is on their best behavior. No brawls have broken out and she only counts two missing bottles of beer, so that’s a plus. The tip jar is empty, but it was only Seelie gold in there anyway. That always vanishes after three a.m.

Maia gets to slinging drinks as the late night crowd trickles in. She’s so busy she doesn’t even look up as she slides a whiskey sour across the counter. Not until she hears, in that telltale worn-down Australian accent, “This isn’t what I ordered.”

Maia’s muscles seize. Jordan smiles at her.

“In fact, technically I didn’t order anything,” he adds. She used to make fun of the way he said that word, _an-a-thang_. “I think you meant this for my neighbor, here.” He nudges the glass along to its rightful recipient, easy and charming and hateful.

“What do you want, Jordan?”

He cuts to the point. “Is Jace in?” So polite, like he’s a kid come to the door to ask if Jace can play. A chill settles on her shoulders. 

“Why?”

Jordan holds his hands up palms-out to indicate no ill intentions. “It’s all business, I promise.”

Maia knows what that means. Cold climbs down her spine and wraps around her shoulders. “Jace doesn’t need the Praetor. He has the pack.”

“He’s a special case,” Jordan explains. “I mean, Valentine’s experiment becomes a werewolf? We have no idea what he’s capable of. There’s never been a wolf with such a high concentration of angel blood. Prime Praetor material, right there.”

Towards the end, Maia had trouble unbraiding Simon from Jordan in her heart. It wasn’t just that they lived together and Simon had unknowingly made friends; it wasn’t just that Jordan found a seemingly innocuous way to insinuate himself into her life again through Simon. It was that she recognized a certain sweetness in Simon that she had only imagined in Jordan, a sheepish charm that had attracted her to them both. Simon was the real deal and Jordan only a Trojan horse, but her brain had gotten it all tangled up anyway. 

Jordan ruined things with Simon. He couldn’t have Jace too.

Maia’s voice comes out low and fast, and it feels strangely disconnected from her. “I’m only going to say this once. Jace does not need the Praetor. If you go anywhere near him, I will rip your throat open and let you bleed out wherever you fall.” She meets his eyes, hard, and hers don’t change at all. She doesn’t need to be a wolf to follow through on that. “Do you hear me?”

“Maia —” he starts.

“Do you hear me?” 

Had he ever?

“I have to do this.” He really means it. He is so comfortable hiding behind that excuse. “It’s my job. It’s what I do.”

“Then do it somewhere else,” she says. 

She’s still trembling when Jordan leaves and she hates herself for it. She leaves the busboy in charge and goes back to get Jace, just so there’ll be someone standing next to her out there. Someone who gets it. But as her fingers alight on the door to push it inward, her ears pick up on the sounds she must have heard underneath the din of the bar. Jace breathing fast. Sharp little noises being smothered in his throat. The rhythmic sound of skin on skin, fabric rustling. Maia takes half a step back and laughs and presses her thighs together.

That idiot is _jerking off_ in there.

Maia doesn’t say anything when Jace reemerges, but the tip of her tongue is tender with holding back. When she sidles around him, she almost finds herself saying, _Bar fights are a fetish for you, huh?_ Quiet and sarcastic, just for him to hear. Or maybe, _Jordan wants to make you his newest project_. She imagines the reactions that would play over Jace’s face, amusement and affront. She keeps her mouth shut.

The Hunter’s Moon is packed until closing on weekends, but tonight is a Wednesday. Aside from the most despondent vampires and psychotropic Seelies, it’s usually pretty solitary after midnight. Werewolves and mundanes have work in the morning, after all. So the room is less than half full when Maia finally does crack. “You know, you’re not supposed to jerk off at work.”

His head snaps up like it might snap off. Maia taps her ear. His open mouth shuts on a smirk. “Fuck.” He leans one hip against the bar, arms crossed. “No fucking privacy in the Downworld.”

“Nature made us eavesdroppers.”

“Among other things.” He sighs. “You were right. Horny as fuck.”

“Two steps ahead of you every time, blondie.” Maia serves up a pair of plasma shots to a moody vampire who sulks back to her corner table alone. “But this should be old news for you, right?”

“Why’s that?”

“You weren’t exactly celibate before.”

“Ah, I already fuck everybody, so I should be used to feeling like a live wire?” Jace is unoffended, but Maia pours them each their own single-serving of tequila anyway. “I was used to being angry all the time too, but…” He shrugs. 

“But,” Maia agrees with a nod. They drink. “I went through my own, you know. Phase. After.”

He lifts his eyebrows like he’s about to double dog dare her for details; it’s a schoolyard kind of look, mean and flirtatious. She snorts.

“Let’s just say I went home with anyone.” That is, of course, a euphemism: Maia didn’t go back to anyone’s place or bring them to hers, but she was the queen of the restaurant bathroom hook-up, never averse to a tumble in the grass. In the heat of her turning, jagged over Jordan, it hadn’t really mattered who was touching her. As long as she was the one telling them where and how to touch.

But after a while she could tell the guys she fucked thought she was some kind of big crazy slut, that they had no understanding of who she was or what she needed or why she wanted what she wanted. It started to get to her. She was using them as much as they were using her, but she still knew they were people. She still treated them like people.

After she’s given Jace the high-and-lowlights, Maia says, “Masturbating your way out of Downworlder puberty is probably the safest way to go about it.”

“Plus, everyone hates me,” Jace says. “No one’s really lining up.”

There’s still an hour until closing time, but only one table is full. There are three girls, Downworlders and a mundane, an unusual mix. Maia nods towards them. “You could go for someone more human.”

Jace smiles a little, tilts his head. “Could I?”

Maia smiles too and holds out her glass for a fresh pour. “Theoretically.” 

“Have you ever been with another werewolf?”

She nods. “Way back. No one in the pack, though.” His brows draw together, so she explains, “There are no rules against it or anything, it just would’ve been weird for me.”

That’s been on her mind lately. Don’t shit where you eat.

“Is it different?”

He’s got a familiar expression on his face: chin lowered so he can look up at her, something secretive and hungry in his eyes. 

“I don’t know.” Maia shifts her stance, legs so straight and tense they might lock like that. “You’ve been with werewolves, too. You tell me.”

“Just you,” he says. “I meant being with someone who’s the same.”

Maia thinks about those few rough and quick encounters but finds them hard to distinguish from any other similarly furtive hook-up in her memories. “No,” she says finally. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe vampires get up to some weird shit or whatever. Simon never bit me or anything. People are people, it’s different because of whatever is different about them.”

The girls are getting to their feet, arms linked, bumbling into each other as they leave. Bills are left heaped on the table. It better be enough. 

“Why?” Maia asks. “Do you want to compare and contrast?”

It takes two of them to get the door open and then four tries to get through it, but the girls finally make it out. The door shuts with a finite _swish_. 

“No,” Jace says. Inviting him behind the bar was a mistake. Maia knew that as soon as she offered. “That’s not what I want.”

They’re on each other immediately, mouths fused together, her hands curling into tight fists in his hair. Jace hoists her up onto the counter, kisses her neck, touches her tits and her thighs. Puts his hands up under her shirt, shockingly hot through the lace of her bralette. “You’re not supposed to have sex with your sponsor,” Maia breathes. 

“Okay.” Jace kisses her hard, bites her lip. “Luke is my sponsor. I won’t have sex with him.”

Maia laughs. She grabs a handful of t-shirt at the middle of his back and yanks it over his head. Her fingertips drag over his now-faded marks. She wants to eat him alive. 

Jace tugs her panties down as she shifts closer to the ledge, then reaches over to grab a condom from the handy bar-top bowl while Maia leans down to unzip his jeans. He’s inside her immediately, just the same, as good as before or better. She wraps her legs around him and he thrusts twice before muffling a frantic moan against her throat and going still. 

Maia blinks. She waits. He doesn’t move. “Is that…it?” 

“Fuck.” Jace’s face is buried against her skin, hot with embarrassment. “I am so sorry.”

Her body is still in high gear. Her pulse is furious, her lungs raw. Revved up. “Oh my god, were you only good at sex because of runes?”

Jace laughs and then groans, pulls out and pulls back. “Let me at least —” He starts to drop to his knees, but Maia grabs him before he can get too far.

“Let’s not make it zero for two.” She can just get off on her own later. With more mild curiosity than outright accusation: “What the fuck, Jace?”

He’s buckled himself back up, but momentarily hides in his shirt as he puts it on again. “It’s been a while.” 

She hops down and twists her skirt into place. Puts her panties back on. “What’s a while? Three hours since you defiled the bathroom?”

Jace glares at her, but the effect is somewhat lessened by fluffy, rumpled hair. “Since the last time you and I, you know.”

Disbelieving, Maia says, “You had a whole girlfriend since we stopped hooking up.” 

He presses his lips together. “Clary and I never slept together.” 

She stares at him. “You were dating for weeks.”

“I was possessed for a lot of that time.”

“Not all of it.” Was she supposed to believe they hadn’t fucked at the first opportunity, after months of longing glances and suppressed feelings? Please. Wasn’t Clary the love of his life, or something?

Jace releases a deep breath. He can’t quite look at her. “Apparently it’s difficult to trust someone with your body when they once pushed you off a building, even if they weren’t in control of themselves while it was happening.” 

Maia hates and yet can’t help how easily she softens. “Jace…”

“But it wasn’t just that. I —” When he meets her eyes, she can see how stupid he thinks this is, how mad he is at himself. “I know she wasn’t my sister. I know that. But I really thought she was. And it made it — weird.” He shakes his head. “So I haven’t, with anyone else, since you.”

Uncharacteristically uncertain, Maia strokes his forearm and wrist, her fingers brushing his. She kisses his shoulder, and her voice is light when she says, “Well, if I’d known, maybe I would have made it special.” 

His lips twitch.

“ _Maybe_ ,” she says.

She moves away slightly but Jace slides an arm around her waist to pull her right back. He just holds her there for a second, quiet and breathless, and then he kisses her. Delicate and lingering, like that Cranberries song. It’s the kind of kiss that makes her nerves chime. When he lets her go, Maia wants him back right away. She wants to be wrapped up again, pressed against the heat of him with her arms around his shoulders. She wants his face against her neck, his rough stubble scraping her up. She wants to be close. 

And that’s fucking terrifying.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maia tries to get some distance. Doesn't succeed.

“Jordan came looking for him,” Maia tells Simon grimly. Sweat beads her brow and shines on her collarbone; her hair has been twisted back with a bandana and she has a box hoisted effortlessly on one hip. The side reads _BLADE POLISH_ in Jace’s loose, blocky handwriting. How he has an entire box of that she doesn’t know and can’t comprehend. 

It’s move-in day. Maia is snatching a moment with Simon in the living room of his apartment, the door open but hallway empty, for now. Jace is outside at the truck with his brother. Too far and too new to hone his hearing enough to hear her.

Simon’s brow knits. “What did he want?”

Maia thinks, “Fuck what he wants,” but doesn’t realize she’s said it aloud until Simon’s eyebrows climb towards his hairline and a little smile plays on his lips. “The point is, Jace can’t lie low forever.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Maia hears the front door of the building jingle and moves further into the apartment, Simon trailing her. She sets the box down. “You need to train with him. His showy Shadowhunter bullshit isn’t gonna fly now. He has to learn to fight like us, use what he’s got.”

Simon half-nods, but the gesture is slow with confusion. “Why can’t you do it?”

Jace’s hands under her thighs as he lifted her onto the bar. His head tilting back under the uncomfortable trickle of the faucet. His kiss that lasted a little too long. “I just can’t.”

Simon looks at her for a minute but doesn’t press, only nods again, more firmly. “Sure. I can do it.” His smile is bright. “Should be a good outlet for us.”

That thing Simon does, where he studies her and then lets whatever he was going to say go? She used to hate that. She used to think _push_. She used to think _say something_. Don’t just let me sit in this feeling. Don’t leave me in it. That heartbreak on his face, his silence — whether unknowing or unwilling, there was a part of her he would never try to access. Not even now. 

Maia touches his arm. “Thanks.” 

Jace comes through the door next, laughing at something Alec said, his arms stacked precariously with boxes. She and Simon are caught in a too-serious moment; Jace raises an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Let me guess,” Maia says. “Those are all four hundred of your identical leather jackets.”

Jace lifts his chin with put-upon haughtiness, an aspect of himself she didn’t know he was conscious of enough to satirize. “They have subtle differences.” 

Maia rolls her eyes as she reaches for her jacket. “I trust you boys can handle whatever’s left.”

Jace falters. “You’re leaving?”

Maia makes a humming affirmation.

“I thought you’d —” he says, and then doesn’t finish, embarrassed. He doesn’t look at Alec or Simon, but she can feel his awareness of them.

As she passes him, she pats his cheek hard enough to be a slap. “Angel boy, I gotta go,” she says without further explanation, because even that sharp touch is too much. It’s maddening; she’s mad about it. “Don’t get into trouble.”

After her, Jace calls, “Where’s the fun in that?”

Her phone rings as soon as she sets boots to pavement. It’s Luke, so Maia actually picks up. “What?”

“Polite,” Luke remarks in that chiding, fatherly tone she lets slide sometimes. “We might know who did it.”

Maia comes to a stop at the corner, lips tightening. “Who?”

She hears the shuffling of papers over the line, so Luke must be at work. Maybe using his police contacts to their advantage. “Wolf named Kelly King. No one’s seen him since that night. Fits the description.”

“That’s not exactly DNA evidence.”

“No,” Luke agrees. “But it’s curious. He left the New York pack two years ago when he moved out West.”

The walk signal lights up and Maia follows its direction. “So what the hell was he doing in the city, scratching up Shadowhunters?”

“That’s the question. Heard from the pack that King was back in New York a month ago, but they didn’t know if it was for good or not.”

“Weird,” she concludes, only half-convinced. She can spin conspiracy theories in her head (maybe someone from the pack hired an outsider to defuse suspicion; maybe King had come back on a vengeance mission when he heard what happened to his old home) but she’s not going off half-cocked without proof. “What happened to the body?”

“Still tracking it down. The Shadowhunters don’t have it, so the NYPD might have picked it up. Not really up for taking Jace on a morgue tour of the city just yet.”

Maia agrees. “Keep me posted,” she says and hangs up before Luke can say anything else.

She goes home, changes, goes to work. Jace is coming in for the afternoon shift and Maia’s already dreading it, being back in close proximity to him without knowing what turn things are going to take now. The first time they’d hooked up, back in the alley, neither of them had ever really addressed it; they just had one weird week of Jace showing up at the bar like a specter, Maia dragging him into dark corners to fuck. Then it was over and that was that. 

It feels different now. Maia still doesn’t want to talk about it.

Not that it matters whether Jace is here or not. She’s let him into too many of her spaces and now he lingers even when he’s nowhere near. 

But she’s still annoyed that he’s late. 

Twenty minutes after his shift was supposed to begin, the door opens and there’s a ripple of laughter, then a buoyant wolf whistle. Jace clears his throat and says, “Maia, do you have pants?”

Maia looks up, attitude already etched into her face, but it crackles into laughter as soon as she sees him. She can’t even answer, she’s too busy bent over the counter cackling. Jace is standing there moody and naked with his hands cupping his junk, shoulders hunched.

“I didn’t mean to,” he sulks. “I could smell barbecue on 2nd and before I knew it — wolf.”

Maia is hysterical, gasping with laugher. “Thank you for this, honestly,” she gets out. “Made my afternoon.” 

Unfortunately for Jace, Maia only keeps a change of her own clothes at the bar. He still has his stained sweater from the drink-tossing debacle, but he’s forced to pair it with an ill-fitting snakeskin skirt that Maia got on sale at Zara. Maia is not mad about it and neither is anyone else: Jace makes better tips than he ever has before.

“My eyes are up here, Maia,” he teases her and she groans, shakes her head. Does not look.

“Don’t flash the customers.” 

Solemnly, “I can only do what I can do.”

Despite the transformation hiccup, he’s in a bright mood, uplifted from a morning spent moving around, joking with his brother and picking on Simon. She doesn’t have it in her to share Luke’s update. Maybe she shouldn’t be so critical of Simon; she can’t make herself push either. 

“So,” Jace starts when there’s a lull, and Maia seizes up, “I think I’m going to go on patrol tonight.”

It wasn’t what she expected him to say, but it’s somehow worse. “What?”

“Alec said it would be cool if I went with Izzy. Like an outside consultant.” Almost defensively when there is no response from her: “Luke does it sometimes.”

“Uh-huh,” Maia says.

She’s not here to tell him all the reasons why it’s a bad idea for him to do that. She isn’t his mother or his girlfriend or his babysitter. 

She adds, “Have fun.” 

His eyes are on her, uneasy. “Cool.”

Maia takes pity on him. “You gonna wear that?”

He grins. “Not if I wanna keep what’s under it.”

Isabelle swings by to get him after work. She brings a change of clothes, though Jace’s haphazard ensemble clearly delights her. Maia half-watches out of the corner of her eye as he shimmies into jeans and boots; she’s almost sorry to have her skirt back, but that makes up for it.

“I’ll see ya,” he says, dips his head in a nod and smiles, too familiar. She waves him off.

Maia gets dinner, goes home, works on a paper for school. Watches bad reality TV and re-reads the first chapter of _Jane Eyre_. Doesn’t recognize her behavior as restless until she hears a knock and is on her feet immediately, like she’d been waiting for it. 

Jace is different on the other side of the door. She can tell right away. His mouth is tight again like it was the night he got infected, but there are no marks on him. No blood stains his skin or his shirt. 

“What happened?” she demands.

“Nothing.” Jace shrugs, looks past her. “What are you doing?”

Maia narrows her eyes. “Reading. How was patrol?”

He wets his lips. “Fine. Iz and I did what we always do. Walked around. Killed a demon. Business as usual.”

She steps aside to let him in, assessing the cagey body language, his shoulders up by his ears. Compares it to the easy calm he’d had all afternoon. 

“I just — I feel weird?” Jace tries. “A little weird.” 

“Okay. Weird how?”

He runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know.” 

They stand there, Maia by the door and Jace at the center of the room. His nervous tension is palpable and uncharacteristic but she doesn’t want to say or do anything that will make it worse. She has to wait for him. 

He closes his eyes and takes a breath and looks at her. “It was normal,” he insists. “It was one demon. There were two of us.” He speaks like he’s giving a report, brisk and to the point, no frivolous details. “It came up behind Izzy and took her down. She was too close for her whip, but I didn’t have a blade. I —” He presses his lips together. “I can’t really touch them anymore, they sort of…vibrate when I do, so I can’t get a grip. I grabbed the demon and pulled it back. I could feel myself starting to turn, but I — I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I snapped its neck. With my hands.”

“You didn’t turn?” 

“No. But I killed it. Just me.” His fingers tap against his outer thigh and his brows draw together with confusion. “I’ve killed a thousand demons. Am I making sense?”

“Yeah, yes, of course,” Maia says. “You’re making sense.”

“I feel like I’m not — like the words aren’t fitting together right.” His breathing starts to pick up, chest going concave with rapid, shallow exhalations. “The whole room is swimming.” He rubs his closed eyes. “Does this make sense?”

Maia moves in, her hands landing gently on his bent elbows. “Yes, Jace,” she says again. “I understand. You’re making perfect sense.”

“I don’t —” His hands fall away and curl into fists. Now his eyes are red and wet, but not from the attention. “I don’t understand.” After the first tear slides down his cheek, the rest are quick to follow. He’s desperate when he looks at her. “What’s wrong with me?”

Maia is almost aggressive when she jerks him into her arms. “Breathe,” she orders. “You’re okay. You’re fine.”

It takes him a minute, but his arms snake around her as he presses his face into the crook of her neck. He’s a little too tall for it to be comfortable, so Maia pushes up onto her toes to make up the difference. He’s crying for real now, gasping and ugly. He shakes his head. “I’m all fucked up.”

“Yeah, well, take a number.” Maia rubs the space between his shoulder blades. “It’s the human condition, babe.” She turns her face against his, cheek sliding against his hair. “But yeah, you got a rawer deal than most.”

“I can’t fuckin’ do anything,” he says, thick. “They make it so you don’t know how to do anything else. But now I can’t even do that. Can’t — patrol, can’t —" He laughs. It’s not a real laugh. “I can’t even fuck right. Am I good for anything?”

“There’s a hell of a lot more to you than killing and fucking, Jace.” She sounds angry but she’s not, not at him. 

“Yeah?” he says. “Where?”

“Don’t say stupid shit like that.” Maia thinks of the night she met him, his bloodied face lit up by the streetlights outside Magnus’ building. Jace saying _I know what it’s like to lose someone you love_. Saying, _you can kill me, but please let me get to him first_. “You know better.”

He cries for a while after they stop talking. Maia holds him even though the position is making her calves cramp. When he calms down, she wipes her fingers over his face and offers to take him home. It’s a loaded word, home. But he nods in agreement, so they go.

She doesn’t want to baby him but he’s shaky and she’s not made of stone. Her fingers kind of hover at the edges of his aura, prepared to clutch if needed. His body stills on the train ride, becomes once again composed and in control, but it’s the kind of relief that only comes after you’ve wrung yourself out completely.

Simon is out when they get there, so Maia and Jace sit on the couch together and watch a dumb movie — something actiony, she doesn’t care. He puts his head in her lap and she strokes his temples until he drowses. What happened to her?

“I was fine,” he murmurs. “All day.”

“You haven’t been fine for a long time,” Maia tells him, and he has nothing to say to that. “Do you want me to go? So you can sleep?”

His fingers contract on her knee. “No.”

Somehow, they end up crushed into the small space together, Maia tucked between Jace and the couch. She lays her cheek against his chest and throws a leg over his hips. Pauses. “Do you have a boner right now?”

An amused noise bubbles out of him and he covers his face, no energy even to cringe. “It’s my natural state lately,” he says. “I’m a mess.”

Laughter gets them both. Maia relaxes for the first time all day, even though this was the very thing she had not wanted at the start of it. She is terrified of being the person whose door he turns up at. She is afraid to soothe. 

Eventually they fall asleep, though Maia wakes sometime later to find Simon gingerly draping a blanket over both of them. She gives him a sleepy, bemused look, but he smiles sadly and shrugs. “Bagels in the morning,” he says.

It feels dreamy and disconnected from everything else, absurd. “You can’t eat bagels.”

“Don’t argue,” Simon says, trying for cute and succeeding as usual. He gives her a goodnight nod before going into his room, a hush descending after he closes his door. He’d turned the TV off too, so there’s very little light with which to see, not that she needs much. Pushed up on one arm, she looks down at Jace and finds she’d been wrong: there is a little scrape high on his cheek, almost by his ear. 

Maia leans down to press her mouth to it, then carefully climbs over him and leaves.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jace is initiated into the New York wolf pack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got a little carried away with the fight scene in this one. There are also references to Jace's suicidal tendencies.

Maia puts her boots up on the kitchen table, chair tilting back dangerously but staying balanced on its back legs. She sets her beer aside and reaches for an orange, gets to peeling while she watches Jace and Simon do their little courtship ritual on the living room rug. They’d pushed all the furniture out of the way so they could have enough space to spar, grappling over and around as they try to pin each other to the floor. Dumb boys. 

It’s not the worst way to pass the afternoon — eyes on the bulge of Simon’s arm in a t-shirt that probably used to fit a lot better, studying the slope of Jace’s straining back. Jace is good at hand-to-hand, of course, but he relies too much on Shadowhunter technique. She can see his hands itch for weaponry. His fingers flinch at his thigh, searching for a holster. He’s stronger, but less agile; he doesn’t know his way around his body now.

He seems clumsy and uncomfortable next to Simon, who is quick and quiet, naturally soundless. Jace’s breathing is rasping and loud, his every step uncharacteristically uncertain. Simon zips around him speedily, ducks his blows, disorients him. Jace needs to use those souped-up new senses he’s got but it’s almost like he refuses to give in to himself. 

_Listen,_ Maia thinks as she pops an orange segment into her mouth. Listen to the way the air shifts around Simon when he moves. _Smell_. Learn the scent so well it’s embedded in your brain. Even now, if she tried, Maia could practically taste the warm iron of Jace’s Shadowhunter blood. Years of quasi-psychic powers have made his tracking rusty, but Maia knew that from the day she met him, scenting his blood all over New York City. He left her so many clues it was like he wanted to be found. Wanted her to kill him.

Jace gets increasingly frustrated by Simon’s evasiveness until he snaps, stops thinking and lets instinct take over. He grabs Simon by the back of his shirt and yanks him down, gracelessly drops him on his ass on the carpet. They tussle for a minute, one on top and then the other, until Jace growls low in his throat and his eyes flash gold. He slams Simon’s shoulders to the floor. Holds him there. 

Maia applauds by tapping one hand against her beer. 

Jace is breathing hard, sweat-damp hair hanging in his face and shirt clinging wetly between his shoulder blades. He looks down at himself and then sits back, grimacing. “Sorry.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t this the —” Simon looks down too, blinks rapidly. Would probably blush if he was full on blood. “Oh. That’s — It happens. No big deal.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Maia says, though based on what she knows of the two of them, he probably could. “These days Jace gets a boner when he washes his hair.” 

Jace’s eyes shift towards her and Maia shrugs one shoulder, like, _well, you do_. He smiles without smiling. 

“I remember,” Simon says, then hastily amends, “Not that I know about Jace’s boners, I just — I — you know, I remember from when I turned.”

Maia and Jace raise their eyebrows as one.

Simon vacillates, then says, “And that’s how Raphael learned the importance of knocking at the Hotel Dumort,” in a finite way, like it’s the end of a much longer story. He does sad little jazz hands for emphasis. Maia snorts.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Jace hops to his feet and moves into the kitchenette to take a leftover burger out of the fridge. He tears into it ravenously. To Maia, “Notes?”

“You fight like a Shadowhunter,” she says. “And you’re not one.”

“Hm.” He absorbs that without comment but drifts towards her, lays an indifferent hand on the outside of her thigh. “I’m getting in the shower.” He’s dripping sweat, his skin shining with it. Wolves run hot already and he’d been going at it with Simon for over an hour. Maia is not repulsed. She wants to lick him. “You still gonna be here when I’m done?”

It’s playful but pointed. Maia tugs his arm towards her and takes a bite of his burger, wipes ketchup from the corner of her mouth. “There’s a pack meeting tonight. I’ll see you later.”

Dissatisfied, Jace pouts. It’s so genuinely sulky that she has to laugh.

“Go shower,” she says, pushing him away. “You’re disgusting.” 

When he’s gone, Simon offers, “You know, I think you broke his heart a little the other day.” He’s still sprawled on the floor, propped up on his arms and showing no evident signs of exertion. “After he woke up, he said it was my fault you left.”

Maia stands. She brushes crumbs off her jeans and finishes her beer in one long swallow. “Jace’s heart isn’t my business. I’m just here to keep him intact.”

Simon starts to say her name, but she cuts him off.

“Don’t try to be helpful,” she says, wry. “I didn’t appreciate it when your new girlfriend did it, and I don’t appreciate it now.” 

Embarrassed, Simon says, “Nothing’s going on with Izzy.”

“Uh-huh.” Maia shrugs into her jacket. The weight of leather on her bare arms is strangely fortifying, makes her feel like a tough girl, no soft spots. “Plenty of people are looking out for Jace’s heart. He doesn’t need my eyes on it too.”

The pack used to have upwards of fifty wolves in it. All ages, families and loners, someone who could get you a job at the bar when you were new in town or hook you up with a room for rent that wouldn’t break the bank. Now there are eighteen of them. Eighteen. Husbands and wives left slaughtered on the Institute floor; parents and kids who picked up and went out west, where it was supposed to be safer. There are only three women: Maia, an older woman named Lorena who works odd hours as a perpetually exhausted truck driver, and a divorcée named Dakota. The rest are posturing men, all jockeying for a position close to their alpha, resentful of Luke and respectful of him at once. 

There’ll be nineteen, after Jace. Still can’t make it to an even twenty.

Lorena lost her son to the battle at the Institute. Ian’s boyfriend was killed; Garrett’s sister is gone. Maia’s best friend ended up bleeding out in New York Harbor because Valentine wanted to make a point to a boy who was not his son. They will not fold Jace into their number as easily as Maia once promised him, but she’s not about to let them cast him aside either. She just doesn’t have high hopes about tonight.

Maia arrives early and spends forty minutes picking at noodles while Russell holds court with the other wolves. He’s planning something. He’s getting them riled up like he always does, talking about the hard times they’ve been through this year and the importance of closing ranks. Maia loses her appetite. When Jace texts her that he’s close, she goes out to meet him. She wraps her arms around herself to stave off the cool, ripe breeze rolling in off the water and scans the buildings until she spots Jace walking up amongst them. 

His fingers tap at his thigh but otherwise he appears to be blankly composed, no hint of nerves. She’s seen him do this before, retreat into bland impassivity rather than own up to a feeling. She does the same thing. 

“What’s up with you?” he asks, leans in for a half-hug. “Why are you all shirty?” 

“Gee, I wonder.” 

He smiles, cool and detached. “What’s the worst that can happen? They run me out of town? I always meant to travel more.”

She rolls her eyes. “Normally initiation involves swearing fealty to the alpha,” she tells him, something she’s done twice, first Theo and then Luke. She can almost feel the cold concrete through the knees of her jeans. “But sometimes a pack member objects.”

Jace waits. “And?”

“Get ready to get knocked around,” she says. “He wins, you lose, you’re out.”

His fingers tap, tap, tap, and then curl into a fist. “I don’t lose,” he says.

Maia should have helped him more. Should have given him tips, stepped into the ring herself so he knew what it was like to fight a wolf as a wolf. So what if it made her a little too hungry? She was probably going to fuck him again at some point anyway.

“Don’t rely on what you see,” she says, notices Luke arriving far off. “Don’t think too much. You know how to do this. So do it right.”

Jace’s expression had been studiously empty but now something alights in it. There’s curiosity in his eyes and confusion in the little line between his eyebrows, not at what she’s saying but why she’s saying it. But Luke is here, so there’s no time for Maia to pretend she doesn’t know what she’s implying. 

Luke claps a paternal hand on Jace’s shoulder. “Ready, kids?”

“Always,” Jace says, and nods to Maia. Promises. 

The temperature changes as soon as they step inside the Jade Wolf. Conversation evaporates and is replaced by wary silence. Bat is the only one who perks up, gesturing Maia over. She clamps a hand around Jace’s wrist and goes. 

“I think we all know what this is about,” Luke says, palms raised like he’s already prepared to quell the reaction. “Most of you were here when it happened.”

“After it happened,” Curtis interrupts. “After he killed our brother.” The other wolves echo this with nods and rousing agreement, Russell smug and saying nothing at all. 

“Brother,” Lorena scoffs. “Tell me that wolf’s name. You’ve got no idea who it even was.”

“And if you do, you should say something,” Luke interjects. He’s giving off his patented air of authority, arms crossed over his chest, looking indulgently disappointed. Maia has always wondered if he’s so good at that because he’s a cop, or because he was a Shadowhunter. “Come on, Curtis. You’ve never taken a life to protect your own?”

“Not a wolf’s,” Curtis says, which is true, but he’s killed mundanes and demons, dispatched Circle members and Shadowhunters. “You expect us to take in a Herondale, Valentine’s kid, after what he did to us?”

Jace shifts, tenses, rolls his shoulders. “Not his kid.”

Dismissively, “Close enough.”

“You saw him the night he was attacked,” Maia says sharply. His clothes in shreds, his face shuttered, blood everywhere. “What’s wrong with you? That was you once. What would you have done if you hadn’t had your pack?”

Another young wolf, Wyatt, joins in the unsympathetic thrum. “It’s not our problem if his Shadowhunters don’t want him anymore. He can find another pack.”

“Closer to Alicante, maybe,” someone else quips.

“We know why Maia wants to keep him close,” Curtis says nastily. “Just needs a Seelie and she’ll have a full set.” 

“Fuck you,” Maia says. “At least I can get a date.”

Snickers. It’s telling that Luke does not curb those kinds of comments. She isn’t looking for someone to protect her, but it wouldn’t hurt for him to step in with his own pack. 

Instead he tells them to calm down and puts it to a vote, though packs aren’t really democracies. The odds are not in Jace’s favor, but Lorena throws her hand in and so does Bat, his jaw set with innocent determination. “Fine,” Maia says flatly. “Who’s challenging?”

She knows it’s going to be Russell so she’s not sure why she even asked. He rises with a smirk, sizes Jace up and obviously considers him no great competition. Russell is twice as tall, bulky with muscle. And Jace has no runes. “Let’s take it outside, little guy.”

Jace growls, and Maia can feel a snarl curling her own lips. She gets between them, finds herself saying, “I’ll take his place. Fight me.”

Russell laughs. “Not how it works, girlie.”

“Okay, then I’ll just kick your ass for being such a relentless dick all the time,” she says. “I don’t need another excuse.”

Jace steps up behind her and curls his hands around her arms, tugs her back until she’s almost against his chest. “Maia. I got it. Okay? I can do this.” His voice lowers, quiet in her ear. “I need to.” 

She turns to look at him but he’s glaring at Russell, impatience in his clenched jaw. He isn’t the only one raring to go. The other wolves are eager for the fight, can smell blood on the horizon. They want to see flesh rent and teeth drawn. The outcome doesn’t matter as much as that. They’re a hotheaded group, sure. Releases the tension.

They go outside and form a ring around Jace and Russell. Everyone is jeering, urging Russell on, laughing. Luke and Maia are silent. She wraps her arms around herself again, nails biting into her skin. She wishes she could have just done this herself. 

But it’s stupid to infantilize Jace. He’s been fighting since he was born. There is nothing that puts peace in the lines of his body more than using it for bloodshed, even if he’s different now, even if so much has changed. He drops his jacket in the dirt and pulls his shirt over his head, faces Russell with each deep claw mark standing out sharply on his bare skin. And then, like the asshole he is, he smiles. Holds his hand up and gestures Russell towards him.

Jace uses their difference in size to his advantage. He dances out of range, air whistling in the space between him and Russell’s searching fist. He stays low. He kicks Russell’s legs out from under him, rolls away before Russell can retaliate. And when Russell does manage to make contact — his heavy boot against Jace’s ribs, knuckles splitting his lip — Jace doesn’t even wince, doesn’t blink. He always could take a hit. 

But Maia flinches every time.

There’s something more immediate and brutal about how Jace fights now. He gets close enough to bring a knee up into Russell’s stomach, follows it with a fist to the jaw. He spins away, but not fast enough; Russell grabs a handful of hair to drag Jace back and down, blond strands tangled in his fingers even after he’s smashed Jace to the ground. Gravel embeds in Jace’s shoulder but he turns immediately to bite Russell’s leg through denim, must let his teeth come in because Russell howls, the fabric getting red and wet. 

And then, insanely, Jace holds on — fastens himself to Russell by the teeth even as he tries to shake Jace off with increasing frustration. A final kick catches Jace right in the jaw, hard enough that Maia gasps and turns her head, shuts her eyes. She hears Jace laughing. It makes her wish she was the one who’d kicked him. It’s only Luke’s grip on her that stops Maia from joining the fray.

“Stay down,” Russell barks, which only makes Jace laugh harder as he gets to his feet. He wavers but straightens, spits out a tooth with only mild surprise. 

“Not how it works, buddy,” Jace mocks. 

This time he throws himself at Russell with a volley of strikes. He’s a mess but he’s tireless, whereas Russell has been worn out by chasing Jace and throwing him around. Jace’s eyes glow in the semidarkness of the docks and he transforms just enough to give himself some sharp edges; he sinks already-bloodied teeth into the meat of Russell’s shoulder, scores his skin with claws. Dirty fighting, unfair techniques. Not like a Shadowhunter. 

Jace slams his knee into Russell’s stomach again, and it’s the final straw. Russell buckles and Jace follows him down, straddles Russell’s back and presses his face into the dirt. “Say it,” Jace tells him, blood spattering with every word. “C’mon, say it.”

Russell is unintelligible with anger but he can’t unseat Jace, so he finally has to bite out, “Uncle.” 

Jace releases him, gets up, and extends a hand. “Brother,” he says sarcastically. 

Russell spits at him, a red-tinged glob landing on Jace’s boots. 

After, Maia leads him into the back of the restaurant to assess the damage, but she doesn’t even know where to start. Jace is fucking brutalized. One of his eyes is swollen shut. His speech is thick around his busted lip and fresh blood still dribbles periodically from the corner of his mouth. She’s afraid his jaw is broken. At least two of his fingers definitely are. Bruises have bloomed on him already, wide yellow discolorations speckled with broken capillaries that will turn purple and black with time. She’ll need to tweeze all the gravel out of his skin. He’s so bloody that she’s not sure where all the cuts and scrapes even are.

She’s so furious that her fingers tremble when she touches him and she has to fold them in her lap. “You were trying to hurt yourself.”

“Pretty sure Russell was trying to hurt me,” he mumbles. “Did what you said. Did it right.”

All Maia can see is the hard sole of a boot knocking his head back. His hair in Russell’s fist. “I need —” she falters. “The bandages, I’ll — I’ll be right back.”

She sucks in air as soon as she pushes through the doors. She tells herself that one good turn will heal the worst of it, but she’s had so much of his blood on her hands and she can’t stand it anymore. She starts when someone touches her shoulder and turns to see Bat standing there with the first aid kit, cautious and kind. “Need help?”

“Yeah, I — thanks.” She takes the kit but doesn’t move. 

“Um, I just…” Bat clears his throat. “I gotta say, I think it’s really cool what you do.”

Maia doesn’t get it. She’s dazed. “What?”

“The way you stick your neck out for us. You know, the newbies. You found me, you cleaned me up. Checked on me after. Made sure I knew I had people to go to. And now you’re doing it for him, too, even though hardly anyone else is on your side. It’s pretty incredible. So, um, you know. Anything you need, let me know.” He means it sincerely. “Let me return the favor.”

An odd choked feeling rises in Maia’s throat. It’s not just Jace or Bat or the stupid, violent lives they lead. It’s this sudden memory of a smirking girl with silver hair showing up on Maia’s doorstep after Luke found her, a bag of takeout in hand. Saying, _I’m Gretel, basically the best thing to ever happen to you, thank me later_. Maia had been nasty to her, at first. Didn’t want anything to do with this throng of monsters she didn’t fully understand. But Gretel had kept coming. And kept coming. 

“You will one day, but probably not for me,” Maia tells Bat, and just barely manages a smile. He’s a good one. She hopes he stays that way.

Jace hasn’t moved from where she left him, but he was obviously listening, because he garbles, “That kid has a serious crush on you.”

“Who doesn’t?” Briskly, Maia starts cleaning him up, but she doesn’t get far; Jace stops the progress of an alcohol-soaked cotton pad with a touch. 

“Hey,” he says. “Why’d you leave? The other night.”

Maia could laugh. “Are you serious?”

He shrugs. 

“I left because I had to go.” She dabs at a ragged tear on his arm but gives up almost immediately, because it probably needs stitches, not a band-aid. “This wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t want you to get pulverized.” 

“I’m good at it.”

“I used to be good at tap dancing, but you don’t see me soft-shoeing into every room.”

His mouth wants to smile but it hurts too much. “It makes my head quiet.”

“You do it too much, you might make it silent.” Her hands clench in her lap. “You’re not indestructible, Jace.”

“I know I’m not.”

And that’s the point. He’s always chasing what hurts the most until nothing hurts anymore, ever again. “Neither am I.”

His one good eye searches her face as he tries to decide if she means what he thinks she does. Because he’s been through the wringer, she throws him a bone.

“I care about you,” Maia says quietly. “I can’t watch you get hurt like this.”

Neither of them speaks, and then Jace reaches for her hand. His knuckles are busted. His whole body has been tenderized like meat. And he says, finally, “Tap dancing?”

Maia snorts, would punch his arm if someone else hadn’t gotten there first. She pulls away and rubs her face, groans and laughs. “God, I fucking hate you, Herondale.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not everything about being a wolf is awful. Maia has a soft spot for full moon nights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes quite a debt to a #problematic teen girl werewolf book I loved as a kid called _Blood and Chocolate_. The line "pay your respects to the moon" is taken directly from there, as a shout-out.

“You’re looking at me again,” Jace says.

Maia’s instinctive response is, _no, I’m not, fuck you_. But lately she can’t shake the feeling that something bad is going to happen if she doesn’t keep an eye on him, like he’s going to explode if she blinks. He seems fine. But he usually seems fine. 

“You’re just too beautiful,” she says, flat and sarcastic. “I can’t take my eyes off you.”

He was too fucked up after his fight with Russell to transform that night, but he managed it the day after. One good turn healed the worst of his damage, but not all of it. The minor scratches and bruises were erased, leaving unblemished skin behind, but the rest linger. The deep tear on his arm looks like a long-faded scar. Purple shadows his cheekbone and jaw; gray deepens the hollows of his eye socket. His broken fingers are in splints. He’s still missing a molar. His ribs, miraculously, were not cracked.

The full moon might take care of the rest. Might not. Wolf healing is a tricky thing. It depends on how long the transformation is, whether it comes easy or fraught. 

Jace gives her a wry smile, quips, “Not the first time I’ve heard that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Maia throws her dishrag at him. 

Seated across the bar, hands curled loosely around a tumbler, Jace’s brother remarks, “I can’t believe you let him work here.”

“I know, right?” Jace says. “What kind of establishment is this?”

Maia can recognize Alec tracking Jace’s movements in the same way she does. Waiting to see when the crack will appear, weighing each joke to see how false it is. It’s got to be incredibly irritating to Jace — it would be to Maia — but he doesn’t seem to be chafing too badly under the increased attention. Not yet, anyway.

“I have something for you.” Maia finally pulls the small rectangular business card from her back pocket, where it had been waiting impatiently since she tucked it away this morning. She hands it to Jace and his face changes instantly, going skeptical and cagey. “It’s from Dakota. You haven’t met her yet.”

Maia had been at the Jade Wolf the day after the pack meeting, grabbing lunch and glaring at Russell instead of reading her book, when Dakota dropped into the opposite side of the booth. 

“I heard about what happened,” she said, with raised eyebrows and a twist to her mouth that could only spell _yikes_. “Sounded eventful.”

Maia didn’t know Dakota very well. She was a newer addition to the pack, a mom of two who turned when she was forty-five and still seemed more invested in her mundane life. She always went with the majority when it came to pack politics and missed as many meetings as she attended. Maia didn’t think Dakota cared for her very much, but she didn’t really have any evidence to support that assertion. It was just a feeling. Maybe she was too sensitive. Maybe she had mommy issues. 

“Uh-huh,” Maia said. 

“Last time I miss a meeting, but it was my weekend with the kids.” Dakota’s kids were mundane; they didn’t know anything about the Downworld. “You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

Dakota looked pleasant but frazzled, like a real estate agent or a high school teacher. Her hair was smoothed into a perpetually messy French twist and she wore ill-fitting skirt suits that tended to be slightly disheveled. She was constantly running here or there, always too much to do and not enough time to do it in. 

“Anyway.” Busily, Dakota started riffling through her purse until she found a loose, battered business card that she thrust across the table at Maia. “Here. For your boy.”

Maia didn’t take it right away, but she read it. The card was printed with a silhouette of a tree against the moon, next to the words _Dakota Greene, psychologist_ , with her office address and several phone numbers. Maia raised her eyebrows. 

“Kitschy, I know, but it’s a good tipoff to the Downworlders.” Dakota shook the card. “Come on, take it. He never has to call if he doesn’t want to. I won’t be offended.”

Maia took it. “He’s not my boy,” she said, but in wolf terms, he pretty much was. She protected him, defended him, would have thrown herself into the fight for him. What she meant was _he’s not my boyfriend_ , but that situation was getting stickier by the day.

“Something he can talk about in a session if he likes,” Dakota said with sarcastic sunniness. “I give good discounts to family!”

Now Alec leans across the bar to get a look at the card. Jace holds it like it’s infected. “Hm,” Alec says. He sits back. “You should call.” 

Jace rolls his eyes, but Maia thinks it was a good choice to wait until Alec was here to do this, so they could gang up on him. “What, so someone can tell me I’m traumatized? Believe it or not, I got the message. I was there.” 

Maia digs her fingers into the soft spot under his ribcage, which she knows is still mottled yellow and green. Jace yelps and twists away from her, but laughs. “Oh,” she says, and smiles despite herself, “Did you? Did you get the message?”

“Mean,” Jace accuses, but he puts the card in his pocket, doesn’t crumple it up or throw it away. “What did I do to deserve that, huh?”

“What did I do deserve _you_?” Maia counters. “You know, there’s trash that needs to go out, and I’m pretty sure it’s got your name on it.”

“Which one?” Jace wonders, but he dutifully goes off to tend to the task. 

The good mood goes with him, leaving behind a sudden prickling awkwardness. Maia realizes she has never actually been alone with Alec, only passed him at parties or meetings. She’s tempted to stick her hand out and say, _Hi, I’m Maia_ , but instead she says, “We’ve never really talked.”

“I know.” 

She tops off his drink to be nice, jokes, “Only room for one Downworlder on your docket?” 

“Two,” he corrects. And Maia could laugh, can’t believe that for a second even she forgot. 

Alec looks at her, kind of sizes her up, but she finds his face unreadable. Always has. She thinks of Alec like a chess piece, a knight moving two squares up and one over. He’s tall and surly and responsible. She doesn’t know much about him beyond that.

Finally, he says, “Magnus likes you,” and that’s that, she knows she’s in. Magnus’ regard is ironclad. 

“I must be good people then, huh,” she says. “He likes you too. So I guess we’re both good to go.”

His mouth does a thing that could be a smile. She kind of wishes Jace was here to translate. “And Jace likes you,” he says. “I gotta say, usually he has pretty bad taste outside of the family, but —” 

Maia laughs. “You know he’s not my boyfriend, right?” She should say that to someone.

“Sure,” Alec says easily. “But you’re here for him. In a way we can’t be.” He swallows a finger of liquor with a grimace. “It’s harder now. For me to know what’s going on with him. I can’t —”

He breaks off but doesn’t finish. It takes Maia a moment, but she realizes, “You can’t feel it.” 

Alec inclines his head slightly. Then he says, with an odd reserved sweetness, “I’m used to him being right down the hall.” 

“You Shadowhunters never heard of phones?” she jokes, but soft. “You guys have some serious attachment issues.” 

“They don’t raise us right.” His expression utterly solemn but with humor layered deep underneath it. 

She has the strangest impulse to tell Alec that nothing worse is going to happen to Jace, even though that’s not a promise she can really make. She wants to reassure him, and maybe herself, that this won’t be like all the other times Jace was pulled away, imprisoned, returned a little bit more battered than before. But she can’t.

“I’ve got his back,” Maia says instead. This time when Alec looks at her and nods, she thinks she understands.

By then Jace has returned, reaching around Maia to steal a cherry from one of the waiting plastic containers, which she has told him not to do about six billion times. “Good talk?”

She bats his hand away before he can have another. “Yeah, we complained about you. Turns out we have a lot in common.”

His grin is knowing, and just wide enough to show off the hollow spot of his missing tooth. It’s also promptly wiped off his face when Alec whips a cherry at him, no warning and perfect aim. It bounces off Jace’s cheek, leaving behind a vague pinkish stain before it lands on the counter. “You know you can’t regrow teeth,” Alec says. “Maybe try not to get kicked in them.” 

“Really? You can’t? I didn’t know that.” Jace picks up the cherry to volley it back at Alec. “No hope of a teeth-growing potion from your boyfriend, huh?”

“ _Excuse me_ ,” Maia says. Why are boys like this?

Alec catches the cherry in his mouth, a feat that entertains them both. “Magnus has about fifty thousand better things to do than be your dentist.”

Jace gives a little up-and-down shrug, like, _fair_. Maia pushes him off towards some customers at the far end. “Did your mother have to separate you when you were children?” she says. “Oh, wait, you’re still children.”

Jace laughs. And it’s always a nice surprise, that uncomplicated laughter.

As he walks off, she reminds him, “Full moon’s this weekend,” and the humor’s gone.

But not everything about being a wolf is awful. Maia has a soft spot for full moon nights.

The moon is only full for a moment. One true moment of perfect fullness that makes the silver in your blood sing, gets the wind whistling in your ears. They have to turn that night or suffer the consequences (there are always consequences). But Maia has found that the days that follow, with the moon fat in the sky but no longer technically full, are lucky. Nights for first kisses from sweet boys. Nights spent eating cooking dough with your best friend, watching _Save the Last Dance_ and cackling like witches. 

It’s freeing to turn when you don’t have a choice. You can give yourself up to it without fear. And it doesn’t hurt as much when it’s just an answer to the moon; instead it bubbles sweetly up her arms and legs, tingles in her fingertips. When she howls it feels like someone is really hearing her. 

She’s already a little giddy when she piles into Luke’s car on Friday afternoon. They pick up Jace and a few other pack members before heading north, out of the city. They can’t always do a full moon right, instead have to make do in parks and tiny yards, but Maia’s been on Luke about this. It’s been too long. And it’s Jace’s first. 

Jace turns around in the front seat and looks at her, smiling a little, sensing something. “What’s gotten into you?”

Maia reaches over to scratch at his stubble. “Just you wait, wolf boy.”

It’s a long drive, four hours upstate in a car that gets progressively more packed with eager wolves. Maia sits so far forward in her seat that Luke keeps reprimanding her like she’s an unruly toddler. She strokes the back of Jace’s neck until his shoulders lower from where they’d hunched up around his ears. By the time they spill out at the state park — so sprawling it’s many parks in one, so much land to roam — Maia is ready to spill out of her skin.

She has nothing with her, just the clothes on her back. An old sweater to guard fragile human flesh against encroaching autumn. Jeans that she forgot to return because they don’t quite fit. Paint-splattered sneakers from when she moved into her current apartment. Stuff that doesn’t matter, stuff that can get lost. Nothing special for a night that is. 

Maia sidles up to Jace and grazes his shoulder with her teeth, blunt and playful through his shirt. “Are you drunk?” he asks, his palm settling with significant warmth on her lower back.

“Uh-huh.” Maia tilts her chin up and licks his mouth, but steps away when he leans in like he might kiss her. “Moon drunk.” 

Jace laughs. He starts to say something, but their attention is diverted by the gathering crowd — not just their pack but others, so many wolves drawn to this expansive space. Wolves run this place, in part. They make sure the mundanes look the other way as long as the rules are followed: avoid the areas populated by humans; don’t hunt the protected animals. Run free. 

Half the pack has already ditched their clothes, but others wander around in casual dishabille. Dakota, sitting topless in the grass with Marcel and Lorena, waves at Maia and makes a _call me!_ hand-phone gesture at Jace. Garrett’s naked back and shoulders have already sprouted a thick coat of fur that looks almost like a regal cape held tight to his human body. Aiden strums his guitar on a fallen log until sudden nails split the strings. “Ah, fuck,” he says resignedly. “Not again.”

Jace keeps close to Maia. She can feel heat rolling off him in waves even though goosebumps speckle his arms. He plucks at the front of his shirt a few times and finally takes it off. “I feel like I’ve joined some kind of weird cult.”

“You kind of have.” Maia toes off her shoes and unbuttons her jeans; soft fur ripples up over her belly. When she looks at Jace, she sees his eyes have gone yellow-gold and his ears are suspiciously pointed, the tips topped with wisps of fur. She smiles at him and her mouth already feels full of too many teeth. “Try to enjoy it.”

“You’re funny,” he tells her, with the implication that she is anything but.

Maia peels off her sweater and leaves it in the grass. Cool air whispers over her overheated skin, smelling of honeysuckle and sweet green grass. There’s hunger held back in the heaviness of his gaze. It makes her remember the way his eyes would follow her at the Hunter’s Moon when he was still a Shadowhunter. How it would make the back of her neck hot.

“I mean it,” she says. It’s weird and it’s fucked up and it’s horrible, but, “When you really think about it, it’s pretty wild.” She runs a clawed hand over her altered torso. “I mean, look what we can do.” 

When she turns, she always thinks of the hard-packed dirt under her body soaking up the blood from her ruptured throat. The hazy image of Jordan leaving her there, gasping on blood bubbles. But since she became what she became, no one will ever do that to her again. And there’s power in that.

“Harvest moon at 12:35,” Luke calls before his muzzle lengthens and makes speech impossible. A minute away. The change is creeping up on them, inside and out. Maia fancies she can feel her organs moving around, rearranging themselves as her spine starts to bend, her hips narrowing. 

All around them, people are falling to the ground, catching themselves on their paws. They twist and contort, moaning as their bones grind and crack. Unexpectedly, before they’re totally gone, Jace reaches for Maia. He pulls her in with a still-human hand splayed against her jaw, slides it back to cup the base of her skull. He kisses her, tough and tender and with too many teeth.

Maia presses against him, chest to chest, until her body won’t let her anymore. “Pay your respects to the moon,” she says, mock-seriously, before she turns away and transforms. Easy as one breath to the next on a night like this.

Together, the assembled wolves greet each other again. They bite at ears and bump hip against hip, slink down playfully into the grass and surprise each other with sudden bounds. When Luke growls, they go obediently still before looking up at the vast silver moon in a wave of upturned noses. Then they howl. On and on it echoes, a lingering plaintive sound that layers one over another until Maia can’t pick out anyone in particular. _This is what a pack is_ , she thinks, but no: This is what a pack _should_ be.

She brushes against Jace from shoulder to tail, nudges her muzzle against his and then takes off into the trees. She trusts him to follow but flicks her tail in his face anyway. She’s gratified by the telltale growl she hears. 

New York City can be cold and dirty and taste like stone. It can be warm and rich and full. Every day is an assault on the senses, every day is a mosaic; there is so much to smell, so much to taste. The city is such a complicated place, but it’s so straightforward here. Lush and living, from the soil to the trees and back. Wolves were never meant to live in cities. But they’re people too. 

Maia’s weaving through closely-growing tree trunks when Jace suddenly careens into her. They tumble to the forest floor, mulch crunching wetly underneath them. He sinks his fangs into the thick fur at her throat, muzzle rippling in a snarl, but not to hurt; to play. She kicks him away with all four of her paws, legs locked out straight to push him off. Then she licks his nose and bolts.

She loses him, finds him again. They circle each other, always dancing just out of reach. They launch surprise attacks and hit the ground with heavy limbs akimbo. One runs and the other chases. But when Maia gets Jace on his back after another tussle, he stays put for a moment, looking up at her. Then he stands and bows, head on his lowered paws and eyes glinting. His tail whips back and forth. Her heart pounds. 

He backs up a few steps before turning to dash deeper into the trees. And the stupid thing is, Maia could track him anywhere now. Brooklyn alleys. Miles of tangled trees. A week ago she passed through a farmer’s market on her way to the train and stood too long in the fresh herbs, chasing his scent in tarragon and anise and fennel. Now it’s almost too easy.

A quick scuffle takes him down. He scrambles under her, token resistance, and they tumble together, over and over until they’re wrapped up in human arms and legs, until Jace is kissing her again, his hands rough on her eggshell skin. Her hands rough on his. 

Maia’s body is her own but her brain is still silver, moon-drunk, wolfed. She wants him. She bears her teeth against his throat with a playful growl and hears an answering one pressed into her ear with a smile. All she can smell is him. She licks the sweat from his neck and breathes him in until she’s dizzy. Maia rakes her fingertips up his spine, but her nails are so short and tidily filed that it’s more of a glide over skin damp with exertion. She pulls her hands back forcibly and pins herself down like that’ll give her some kind of control, shoulders flexing in the dirt and arms up over her head. Her body arches into him. Her fingers warp. 

The tingling starts deep inside her, where Jace is, and zips up through her stomach to her sternum like a streak of lighted gasoline. It simmers and blisters along the insides of her arms until her wrists crack back and her knuckles snap, her too-long, too-sharp claws burying themselves in the leaves until she gives up and buries them in his back instead. Jace whines, a desperate sound.

Her shins are high on his waist, knees jammed against his ribs. Their bodies compacted and folded up close, his arms tight with muscle where they cage her in, her heels leaving moon-bruises on the backs of his thighs. Everything unyielding and raw. She’s conscious of the meat of him, the bones under his skin. The bony jostle of his ribcage, the drag of his belly against hers. Bodies.

It feels like she could turn or die. Her neck is corded with tension, her head thrown back at such an angle she can see the roots of trees. Her chest is too tight to breathe, her throat constricting on air and spit. A vein stands out on Jace’s forehead and she could swear she hears his teeth audibly grinding, the clack of his jaw when he finally unlocks it. His chin nestles for a moment on the flat plane of her chest, watching her with gold eyes, before he surges up, bites her shoulder hard and comes inside her. Maia comes too. When he does, she does.

Her breathing is the first thing she hears, echoing in her own ears. Then her heart. It thumps against her from the inside like it’s trying to get free. Even against the seam of her closed eyes, she sees silver. 

Her palms are wet. When she lifts one to look, she sees it’s striped with blood from Jace’s back — from the long, reckless rip of her claws. “Sorry,” Maia says, wincing, and curls her fingers into a tight, concealing fist. “I’ve —” Her throat works. She’s never done that before.

Jace is unconcerned. He takes her by the wrist and shakes her hand open so he can run his tongue over her lifeline. Then he kisses the bite he left in her shoulder. “Me too.”

He hadn’t broken through, not with human teeth, but she’s startled by the depth and unevenness of the marks, ragged little dashes like Morse code in her puffed skin. She traces the half-moons absently, leaves behind a smear of red by accident. “No harm,” she says. 

Jace blankets her, warm and heavy. His thigh slides between hers and she loops her leg around him, doesn’t bother to move. His cheek is on her chest so she knows he can feel how hard her pulse is still pounding. He murmurs a humming hush into the space between her breasts. 

She’s always been so conscious of what she might do to someone if she ever lost control. “It’ll heal when you turn again.” She doesn’t know who she’s saying it to. 

“Uh-huh,” Jace says.

Maia cards her fingers through his hair and wants to will him into being not so stupid, not so careless, but then she realizes. “Oh _fuck_ ,” she groans. She’s been stupid and careless too. “I hate Plan B.”

Hormonal birth control is the fucking worst with werewolf hormones.

“No, I have a —” Jace makes a breathy sardonic sound. “Rune.”

Her lips twitch. “You had a birth control rune?”

His hand makes a lazy, vague circle in the air. “Battlefields,” he says. “It was an old one.”

“Handy.” She resumes her slow stroking. “I had one once.”

He taps over the butterfly tattoo that’s pressed high on her side, under her arm where it could be easily hidden. “A rune?” he teases. “A battle?”

“Dummy.” She tugs on his hair. “An abortion.” When he stills, she says, “Not Jordan.”

It was before she ever met Jordan, actually. It was the first time she ever went into the city by herself. Paid for it with the money from her summer camp counselor job. Telling Jace these details of her past life makes them sound so fake, so far removed from her that they must have happened to somebody else.

“Summer camp.” He’s amused. “Did you wear little shorts and make lanyards?”

“What of it, huh? What do you even know about lanyards?”

With a smile, he admits, “Absolutely nothing.”

She doesn’t think about the past often. No, that’s a lie — she thinks about staring at the ceiling of her bedroom and begging some unseen force to liberate her from it. She thinks about crawling out of her window at night to go drink in the park. She thinks about Jordan. But she doesn’t often think about the other stuff, the things that hurt — teaching kickball to the camp kids, going shopping with her friends (she had them then, Priya, Lexie, Shayla, and Kate), secretly getting her belly button pierced at the mall. She had a job at the mall. Sold pretzels. Gave them to her friends for free until she got fired. 

“You know, I used to read about werewolves, before.” Maia feels corny just owning up to it, but it makes her smile, too. “And vampires and witches. The whole deal.” Trade paperbacks with illustrated covers and questionable romances, girls with claws.

“Oh, so you were a nerd.”

She gives his cheek a soft smack, but allows, “Maybe a little, on the inside.”

His eyelashes brush against her as he closes his eyes, at ease. “What else were you, on the inside?”

Maia tells him about how there was never anything to do at night so she and her friends would drive around empty streets long after curfew, singing along to pop songs with the windows down. They would go to all night diners and get cheese fries. After Maia dropped everyone off at home — she always drove, saved up and bought her first car herself — she would play “Fast Car” as loud as she could and scream it.

“I don’t know,” she says, laughing. “I felt like it was about me.”

Then Jace says the single most horrifying thing he’s ever said to her: “What’s ‘Fast Car’?”

“What?” Maia sits up, elbow in the leaves, dislodging him. He’s disgruntled about it. “Come on. ‘Fast Car’!”

He’s nonplussed, so she hum-sings a little bit of it, mangling and mumbling the lyrics and not making her case even slightly. He’s laughing at her five seconds into the chorus, and then Maia’s laughing, even harder when he says, almost apropos of nothing, “I don’t even know how to drive.” 

“You never went to the boardwalk, huh?” She tucks his hair behind his ear. “You never got Dairy Queen?”

“I had swords,” Jace tells her. And there is something horrible about that in a very profound way — Maia’s ice cream nights; Jace’s broken bones — but the matter-of-factness with which he says it renders the whole thing so absurd she makes a garbled noise that can’t be categorized. She covers her mouth, mortified, but Jace smiles. 

He rolls on top of her again, too comfortable a fit, and studies her face for too long a moment. His thumb touches the top of her cheekbone, light. “We still ended up in the same place.”

“Yeah.” Shell-shocked by that, honestly. “We did.”

“And look,” he bends to kiss her, “what we can do.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maia is in love with Jace and she does not care for that shit at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

“Congrats to us, I’m not pregnant.”

Maia’s shift doesn’t start for another ten minutes, so she hoists herself onto one of the stools at the bar. It’s funny to be on the other side for once, looking at Jace with a towel slung over his shoulder and an empty glass in one hand. He’s gotten better. 

He’s taken aback in an unobtrusive way, just a slight straightening of the shoulders. Then he gestures down at his crotch, a circular hand-wave with fingers spread. “Do you think all those hits I took in the field killed my guys?”

“Here’s hoping.” Maia gives him a mockingly sweet closed-mouth smile. “Vodka soda, please.”

“You gonna finish it before you’re on duty?” It’s a condescending tease as he reaches for a fresh glass, turns to get the bottle. There’s a greater ease in his body since the moon. His injuries have healed, his joints are looser. She notices the hunch of his shoulders less. 

“What are you, my boss?” Maia takes the drink, her fingers overlapping his — the cold glass, the warmth of his skin. “Mind your business.”

He shakes his head with a soundless laugh. 

“Shadowhunters raise such narcs,” she adds, watching him, and he laughs again.

“You’re gonna have to quit it with that. Can’t blame everything about me on being a Shadowhunter anymore.”

“That’s right. It’s just your personality, then.” 

Absently, Maia’s hand slides under the collar of her t-shirt, resting on the skin beneath her bra strap. Right at the dip where the ball of her shoulder leads up to the slope of her neck. When she realizes what she’s doing, she snatches her fingers back.

There’s nothing there. Just flesh, just bone. The bumpy indentation of his teeth vanished when she turned again, a rough moon pressed into her skin and taken back just as fast. 

“I’m off in five,” Jace starts. “What are you —”

There’s a sudden clatter from the back. Maia groans, “Is that Cyrena?”

She was training a new bartender, a pixie changeling who had a bad habit of causing accidental avalanches when she tried to move crates with her magic. She also turned dirty dishes into daisies instead of washing them. Maia has no idea how she found someone worse at this than Jace, but there you go.

“I’ll go.” Maia downs her drink and stands. “You can finish up here.”

If he looks disappointed, she doesn’t dwell on it.

Maia sends Cyrena to the front while she starts clearing up the debris in the storage room. No bottles shattered, thank god. Just empty boxes, one or two smashed. She’s gathering up the broken bits in one hand, careful of splinters, when there’s a knock on the door frame. Jace is there, jacket on and almost smiling. Hesitant, though. Something in his face she can’t quite access.

Whatever he’s about to say is lost to a sudden, abrupt kiss. Maia looks away and looks back and there she is: kissed, caught in the curve of his arm. He clutches the doorframe with one hand, suspended halfway into the room; he never steps over the threshold. But Maia almost seems to _rise_ into him, without even meaning to. Without thinking twice.

Her fingers contract around the fragments of wood she’s holding. Her palm prickles. When Jace pulls away, Maia licks her bottom lip. Tastes him.

“Call me when you’re off,” he says. “Even if it’s late. See ya.” And he’s gone. 

Maia gets back to work. There’s a small sliver of wood in her palm, but it’s easily plucked out, not even a drop of blood left behind. When she goes back out, Cyrena is emptying a basin of daisies into the trash. She freezes, caught, then offers forlornly, “They still reek of tequila.”

Maia takes a daisy and lifts it to her nose, thinks idly that there’s probably a market for boozy flowers. “They’re gonna start taking those out of your paycheck.” 

Cyrena was raised a mundane, and it shows: earrings line her greenish, pointed ears and she’s wearing a Wonder Woman t-shirt with ripped jeans. “I’m doing you a favor. They’ll compost!”

Maia snorts. “How was it today? Any disasters?”

“Mhm.” Cyrena tells her about the happy hour warlock clutch that drained them of rosé, then adds, “Oh, and Blondie got into it with a customer again.”

“What happened this time?”

“Guy came in, they had words, and Blondie kicked him out. One-two-three.” She snaps her fingers three times in quick succession and a smattering of violets sprout from the bar top. “Whoops. Anyway, it was pretty quick, but he was pissed.”

Maia’s fingertips trace over the shoulder seam of her shirt. “Words?”

Cyrena shrugs. “Didn’t hear it, I was ass-deep in roségate. But the guy had a _totally_ dreamy accent, wasn’t too hard to look at either —"

Her vision momentarily doubles. _It’s fine_ , she tells herself firmly. _You’re fine_. “Long hair? Australian?”

She already knows what Cyrena is going to say.

Maia leaves early, but not because of that. She does what she’s done for the better part of six years and puts Jordan out of her mind, locks him away behind a door she doesn’t plan on opening. She hates that she can never predict when she’ll turn a corner and find him there; that he can walk into her place of work without warning. The least she can do for herself is not think about him longer than she has to.

She leaves early because she has a date.

They’re meeting at a bar on the Lower West Side that she’s never been to and didn’t bother to Google. She treats herself to a cab and reapplies lip gloss in the back seat while leaning in close to the window. New York is dark and light behind the glass, shadowy and sharp. 

He’s waiting outside when she gets there. Isaac, from Tinder. He lights up when he sees Maia, holds out his hand for a friendly handshake. She appreciates that he doesn’t try to pull her in for a weirdly personal hug. He’s cute like the boys she usually likes: longish dark hair, glasses, a denim jacket over a worn t-shirt. He’s a little goofy, too, in a sweet way. “Wow,” he says. “I mean, sorry. You’re beautiful.”

It’s nice, but Maia bristles. She’s not a treat. He didn’t win a prize for getting a girl who looked like her pictures. 

_Stop being judgmental_ , she tells herself, but it sounds like Gretel. She always thought Maia was too hard on guys, cut her losses too soon. But Maia had her reasons. 

They sit in a booth and split a bottle of wine. The music’s good, which is a plus; old stuff, Prince and Bowie. Isaac works in programming, but his real passion is painting. He’s lived in New York for two years. He shows her pictures of his dog and sits close enough to put his arm on the ledge behind her — around her but not touching her. Maia drifts while he’s talking, looking at his mouth without registering anything he’s saying. 

He thinks it’s a hint. Softly, he asks, “Can I kiss you?”

Maia looks at him. An earnest boy. “I can do you one better.”

He’s confused; he leans in. She tilts away but takes him by the hand and leads him to the back, down the short stairs to the small, dim bathroom. It’s a cutesy bar, a first date place, so there are candles flickering along the high shelf that rings the room. Music’s playing, even in here. Maia curls a hand around the back of Isaac’s neck and drags him over, fuses her mouth against his and arches her body into him pushily. 

He goes with it immediately. She lets him press her against the mirrored wall and kiss her neck, his hands climbing over her body and under her shirt. His palm is cool against her lower back; his fingertips brisk as they drag over her thigh. Wolves are furnaces. Mundanes can’t compete.

There are certain things that are nice about boys, that Maia likes no matter who it is: the expanse of sturdy shoulders, the sensation of being pulled close by the waist. But mostly Isaac feels like nothing. Like Maia is holding on to a whole lot of nothing.

She’s too strong, so when she shoves him away, he skids across the floor. He flails, grabs for the sink. “Shit, sorry, I — I’m sorry, was that not —”

Maia waves a hand. “It’s not you.” She turns away from him and towards the mirror, lips curling in a short, wry laugh. “Well, it is you. It’s who you’re not.” Isaac lurks in the background of her reflection, wary and not sure what to do. What she is has suddenly scared him. She touches her shoulder. “I gotta go.” 

It’s a long train ride to Queens, so she has a lot of time to think. She can play out different scenarios in her mind, imagine all the possible outcomes. But none of it matters once she’s in front of Jace’s building, watching him come around the corner. They haven’t seen a lot of each other since the moon. Maia does the schedule at the bar and lately she’s made sure his shifts end when hers begin, or vice versa. It’s easy to be busy.

He’s in workout clothes, a hoodie zipped up against the autumn chill and his hair sweat-damp at the root. He sees her before he recognizes her; he’s surprised, then cautiously pleased. “Hey. You know I said to _call_ , right? If I knew you were coming, I would’ve gotten dolled up.”

Maia punches his arm. “Shut up.” It’s effortless. “Why are you all gross?”

He moves past her to stick his key in the lock, a complicated jiggling act she remembers from Simon. “I started teaching this self-defense class at a gym around here.” Off her look, “It’s no big deal. Wanna come up?”

She wants to ask how that happened, if he likes it. She pictures him in front of a crowd of hesitant onlookers, all charm and skill. Jace teaching people how to get themselves out of bad situations. Something he did over and over until he couldn’t. But she doesn’t ask. 

Upstairs, Jace hangs his keys on the hook by the door and goes for a glass of water, talking the whole time. “You hungry? There’s this Mexican place on the corner I order from a lot, Simon gets super jealous and watches me eat, it’s like some kind of weird fetish —"

“I want to talk,” Maia interrupts. 

Jace pauses. He sets the water down and leans against the counter, his movements careful and deliberate. “Okay.”

“You can’t kiss me like that at work.” 

His shoulders drop, a minor relaxation. “Oh, yeah, sure. I won’t. I mean, it’s not like we’re the poster kids for professionalism, but —”

“No,” Maia says. “You can’t kiss me like that because we’re not together.”

Another pause. “Okay.” A silent throb of tension. “During the moon —”

And after. She had been pliant the next morning, cozy; she slept the whole ride back with her cheek mashed against his chest and his arm around her. Every so often he plucked leaf fragments out of her hair.

“We had sex.” She shrugs. “We’ve had sex before.”

“Not like that.” He takes a breath. “Maia. I’ve been wanting to talk to you too. After everything, you know, I really think — I want to —" Jace, nervous. You see something new every day. “I don’t want it to be just sex with us.”

Her skin is crawling. It doesn’t show. “Everyone gets carried away their first full moon. It doesn’t mean I have to be your girlfriend now.”

“I know that.” His voice is a little spiky. “I’m not a kid.” 

“It wasn’t anything new for us, that’s all I’m saying.” _It didn’t mean anything_ is on the tip of her tongue, but it wouldn’t be true. And she doesn’t have it in her to lie to him about that. “We’re friends. You’re probably —” She almost falters but pushes through. “Probably the best friend I have right now. We get each other. We’ve both been through some insane bullshit and we’re still standing. You can come to me with anything and I’ll be there for you. And, yeah, sometimes we hook up, but —”

“But you don’t want to be with me,” Jace says evenly. 

She doesn’t say, _I can’t_. She tried to hold back with Simon until Isabelle pushed her into it and look how that turned out. Love made her into a monster and now she rips it apart when it gets too close. 

“Not like that,” Maia says finally. “I don’t want to be with you like that.” She shrugs, a weirdly disconnected gesture that doesn’t feel half as casual as it might look. “You know we wouldn’t pick each other if the circumstances were different.” She shakes her head a little. “I get it, I’m Clary’s first alternate.” 

He looks at her sharply. “What?”

Once Clary’s off the market, they turn to Maia’s side of the bar. Simon’s heart was broken so he used her to bridge the gap until it was healed. Jace proved himself to Maia in an alley and vanished when Clary reappeared. Now he never says Clary’s name anymore. The absence of it pointed and gaping. 

Jace says, “That’s all you think of me?”

“I think a lot of you,” Maia counters. “Didn’t you hear anything I said?” 

Her expression is blank; his is too. They’re just two blank-faced people staring at each other like cardboard cutouts, no one feeling anything except deep, deep down where the light doesn’t reach.

“I’m sorry,” she says. 

Maia often thinks of the morning after his attack. The disembodied tension in her too-bright apartment. It hadn’t felt real then. She remembers how he looked at her, right at her, even though he was in a room full of people who loved him. She hadn’t asked for that, hadn’t earned it. She hadn’t done anything except be in the right place at the wrong time. He needed someone, anyone, and she was there. 

When she leaves the apartment, she stalls on the threshold. All she can think is: _what the fuck are you doing? What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing. You want him_. But what else was she going to do? Sign herself up to get her heart broken by Jace Herondale? Fool her once, fool her twice, fool her over and over again.

Fuck that.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maia doesn't want to miss Jace, but she does.

What did Maia do before?

Not _before_ before, not those mundane days of soft serve and neglect. What did she do before a blond Shadowhunter wandered into her life like a wet cat, sad and matted? It feels so long ago, and it wasn’t. That bothers her.

Before, she had her pack and her job and school. She had Gretel. She went on dates sometimes and shared her Hulu password with half the Jade Wolf. She didn’t grimace every time she saw her scars in the mirror and she could watch Australian shows without the accent making her flinch. Sometimes she even got bored. She was comfortable enough to be bored.

She doesn’t mean to pin it all on Jace, how everything started unraveling after that. It wasn’t his fault. He just happened to have been raised by a man whose brutality had such long-reaching ramifications that even Maia’s life was turned into collateral damage. She never met Valentine. Never saw him. But her friend is dead because of him, she met Jace because of him. Half her pack was demolished trying to stop him. It’s just weird. The boy he raised was nobody to Maia once. Now all she can feel is his absence. 

Maia works. She lets Cyrena take her out some nights. She goes to movies with Simon and is prickly about his silent sympathy. He’s not with Isabelle anymore. Big surprise. 

She dutifully does her readings for school, sitting perched on the arm of the couch with her books scattered on the cushions and the TV on low. She does the things people are supposed to do when they’re sad. Internet self-care. Five minutes of guided meditation in the morning. Sheet masks while watching TV. She paints her nails following a YouTube tutorial, so there’s a gold zigzag down the middle of each one. She doesn’t say anything of value to anyone, because the only person she wants to talk to is Jace and she’s furious about it.

She sees him all the time, at the bar and the Jade Wolf, and she misses him like crazy.

He’s already standing in front of the Institute when she gets there, staring up at its imposing edifice with nothing much on his face. But his fingers tap repeatedly against the outside of his thigh. She wonders what they did with his stele when he left. 

One eyebrow arches slightly when he sees her. “Didn’t know you were coming.”

_Bad surprise?_ “Yep. Luke and I are the whole werewolf outreach team, so.”

He doesn’t want to smile, she can tell. “And me?” 

“You’re the bridge.” But she doesn’t think that’s all he is. Alec specifically requesting the three of them means something. He could have just called in Luke if it was werewolf business.

Jace doesn’t spare her another glance. “No time to waste.”

They head inside and are immediately stopped by a surly-faced Shadowhunter. “Your guys _brought_ us here,” Maia says sharply. “His brother is your _boss_.” She’s this close to spitting, _Don’t you know who his grandmother is?_

Jace studies the Shadowhunter with this funny little smile that works his tense jaw like something mechanical. “Blood’s the only thing that matters to them. As soon as it’s compromised…” He whistles through his teeth, waves a hand. 

Before Maia can add anything, Isabelle is there to retrieve them with a sharp word for their asshole gatekeeper. Luke’s already waiting in the Ops Center, so holding them up was just a dick move. And it’s not the only one: Maia sees the way everyone in the room watches Jace out of the corners of their eyes like he’s a bomb about to go off. He’s been so many things in such a short time. What will he be next?

Alec cuts right to the point. “More Shadowhunters have been attacked. It looks like wolves.”

“Oh yeah?” Maia arches a brow, arms crossed and hip cocked. “How does it look like that?”

Alec has visual aids that flash up on one of the many screens: deep furrows in the flesh from claws, the clamp of what looks like teeth. Jace doesn’t flinch. Maia knows, because she’s watching. 

“Casualties? Transformations?”

“None so far,” Isabelle answers. “We don’t have any leads. Three people have been attacked, and they haven’t been able to identify their attackers. We were thinking a lineup of —”

“Nope,” Maia says.

“No one’s saying the wolves are guilty,” Alec tells her. “We’re just trying to get to the bottom of —”

She interrupts him again. “You mean, you want me to march my pack in here because you guys have a hunch and zero evidence? I know that’s kind of your deal, but it’s not ours. I still remember that time I got microchipped like a rescue puppy and thrown in a cell.” 

“Not _zero_ evidence,” Isabelle offers softly, eyes on Jace. “It’s not an isolated incident anymore. Now it’s starting to look like a pattern.”

Luke stands between Maia and Jace, the three of them in a staggered line on one side of the central table. She can’t really see him without craning her neck; there’s only the edge of his profile, nothing to read. “You want me to identify someone.”

“If you can.” Isabelle and Alec exchange a glance before she looks towards one of the many doorways. “Or even just describe them.”

Maia turns in time to catch Clary coming through with a sketchpad and pencils, expression uneasy. “Hey.”

“I’ve got some pictures, too,” Luke says carefully. “Of possible suspects. From the morgue.”

Right then, Maia realizes why she’s here — to be Jace’s emotional support. She’s the only one besides him who knows exactly what happened that night. She can almost feel the phantom sensation of his fist pressing an imaginary blade against her stomach, glass all around them on the floor of her bathroom. He’d said, _I killed the person who did this to me_. Gutted him and left the body behind.

She sidesteps Luke to grab Jace by the arm and pull him a few feet away, not that it matters. There are eyes on all sides here. “You don’t have to do this.”

He looks at her hand. She lets go. “I don’t?” 

Only two words, but they’re thorns all over. She ignores that. “It’s shitty of them to put you on the spot. You can just opt out, if you want.”

“Can I?”

Jace is not an easy person. He’s distant and likes to play dumb, he can be sarcastic and bullheaded. He does what he’s supposed to do before he ever even considers doing what he wants. She knows this like knowing what you’ll see when you look in the mirror. But Jace has always given away too much to her. He’ll put that little vulnerable part of himself out there like he’s saying, _You get this, right? I know you get it._

Right now, he’s locked up and closed down. A fortress. 

“Why are you being weird?” she demands.

He frowns. “Why are _you_ being weird?”

“I’m looking out for you.”

“Okay.” Maybe there’s a laugh in there, brittle and light as his next words are weighted. “Keep looking.”

Jace is a good soldier, so he goes to look at pictures of dead bodies until he finds the one he’s responsible for. Alec fills the empty space beside her. “Something going on with you two?”

Maia bristles, is a bitch. “Can’t you keep an eye on him?”

Alec lifts his eyebrows. “I’m trying.”

“Try harder,” she snaps, and stalks off. She takes herself to the edge of the floor, near the steps that lead to the next level, and fumes silently. She told him she would still be there for him. She said —

A Shadowhunter with blunt bangs and glasses leans over the railing. “Are you supposed to be here? I —”

Maia cuts her off with a growl. “You want proof of a wolf attack? Talk to me like that again.”

The girl blinks rapidly and steps back, but it isn’t even satisfying because Shadowhunters are so _stupid_ they really think she would attack in a room full of them. Maia takes a deep breath to get herself under control. She puts her hands on the stair rail and bows her head, trying to shake off the anger skittering all over her skin like tiny fireworks. Always such a goddamn temper. She was always in trouble for it as a kid. Sent to her room, sent to detention, signed up for half-assed anger management courses with the underpaid guidance counselor. She never could control it, even before the wolf made it flesh. It takes her a minute, now, to pinpoint what she’s even angry about. Injustice, always. Jace not playing by her rules. Her own stupid inability to let herself be vulnerable. 

Then Clary’s voice breaks through, a wavering note of real panic in it. “Jace?”

Maia’s head jerks up and she’s on the move before she even registers what’s happening. Jace is standing at the table, a dead man emblazoned in full color on one of the screens and a half-formed face on Clary’s sketchpad. His fists press into the glass, white-knuckled, and his back is rounded. Knotted. Muscle roils in waves and his body jerks, his t-shirt splitting at the sleeve as he starts to change. He’s saying something; mouthing it. _No, no, no, no, no._

Alec says her name, but Maia has already slid in next to Jace. She presses her palms against his cheeks and jerks his face towards her. She doesn’t know what happened. Something triggered him, or maybe he was halfway there before they even walked through the door. She remembers the compulsive tapping. He hasn’t seen the man who assaulted him since the night it happened. The Institute is a fraught place full of catches and traps. Whatever. He doesn’t need a reason.

“Look at me,” she orders. “Breathe.” 

His head lolls against her hands, heavy, as he nods. Breathes. And breathes. Says low, “They’re looking at me.”

“Fuck ‘em.” Everyone is holding their breath, watching and waiting; she can hear the hushed whispers, knows exactly how it feels when a room full of people have decided that their worst opinion of you is undeniably true. “Kept your pants on this time, at least.”

His lips twitch and he shakes his head. The ragged tear in his shirt has exposed his scars to half the Institute, and he gathers the fabric closed. “Don’t make me laugh,” he mumbles. “It’s not funny.”

Relief flutters in her chest. Her fingers settle over his, slotting between his knuckles. “It’s a little funny. You want to get out of here?”

Alec points her towards a door and Maia takes Jace into a wood-paneled hallway, where there’s an alcove with a bench in it. The only part of this place she’d ever seen before was the room where they placed the bodies of her pack members. She wonders what the Shadowhunters use it for, normally. Do they train in there, or have parties? Do they ever think of the blood?

This was Jace’s home once. Maia knows all about that. If she ever went back to her parents’ house, she would probably end up shredding the wallpaper. 

She doesn’t ask him about the specifics. Instead she says, “When it happened to me, I told everyone I got attacked by a dog. But people knew my boyfriend had just skipped town, and they’d seen us fighting. Even though they didn’t know, _couldn’t_ know, they suspected. I went to school with this girl. Cady. One day before gym she made some stupid snide comment. I overheard — well. She wanted me to hear it. She said —” There’s a scoff and a laugh tangled up in Maia’s throat, but it is decidedly not amusing. “She said, ‘I would never let a guy hit me.’ I couldn’t hold it together, I turned. I had to curl up in the bathroom until I turned back. Got written up for skipping class.” After a beat, she adds, “He never hit me. Just, you know. Slit my throat.” 

Her friends had been worried for a while, but well-meaning concern can only bump against a brick wall so many times before people get tired. They thought she was in denial about Jordan. Maia wore turtlenecks and scarves for the rest of her senior year so no one ever saw what the marks looked like, never got the confirmation that they were claws instead of fingerprints. She pulled away from her friends, but she’d been doing that already, for months. For Jordan. 

“You’re still new at this,” Maia offers gently. “It’s gonna happen.”

Jace has let his shirt gape open again. The marks have become as familiar to her as his runes once were. “Does it ever feel like your head just starts buzzing? Like…” He clears his throat. “All I could think about was everyone staring at me and talking about me, but they’ve done that since I got here, it was just — I could give them a reason, before. I was the best, right? Talk about that, not —” His leg jitters nervously, sole of his shoe making staccato sounds against the stone. “Not my dead dad. Not —” He rubs his temples. “Not everything else.” 

“I wasn’t just trying to be funny,” Maia says, still soft. “Fuck them. You said it yourself when we got here. It’s all conditional with them. You’re never going to be a good enough boy for all those Shadowhunters. There’s always going to be a _but_. So fuck them.”

When Jace looks at her, it’s too much, again. She doesn’t know how to contain or quantify it. “You weren’t that funny.”

“You laughed.” Hates to admit it, “I was so happy you laughed.”

“Maia,” he sighs. 

“Why can’t we just be friends?” There it is, that vulnerability bleeding through. She should never have let herself be alone with him. “Don’t you want to be friends?”

“Of course,” Jace says. “But you gotta give me a minute. You just dumped me.”

“We were never —”

“You _preemptively_ dumped me.” He hesitates, then, “I know everybody thinks I fuck around and it doesn’t mean anything to me. But that’s not how it is.”

“I know that.”

“And look, no offense to Simon, but he gets in a serious monogamous relationship with every single woman he meets. I’ve been in love twice. I can tell the difference.”

She feels it then, that buzzing he was talking about. Eyebrows raised, she asks, “You over the first time?”

“Who gives a shit? Are you over everything that’s ever happened to you?”

It makes her smile, because that’s kind of the point. “Jordan dropped a bomb on my life,” she says. “No one is ever going to do that to me again.”

His tongue presses against his teeth from behind, bringing that perpetual tension back to the line of his jaw. “I get it. You know what I’m capable of.”

She frowns. “That’s not what I meant, Jace.”

He shrugs. “Ask Clary how her spine’s doing lately.”

“That wasn’t you,” she says sharply.

“My hands.”

“That wasn’t you,” she says again, emphasis on every word. That’s not the kind of pain she’s afraid of, either. “You’re a good person, Jace. You’re important to me. That’s —” That’s why she can’t. “I hate when you talk about yourself like that.”

A weird look crosses his face, one she can’t read right away. 

“What?”

Jace sighs and leans forward, his forearms resting on his knees. “Do you just feel bad for me?” 

Maia stares at him. “ _What?_ ”

He runs a hand through his hair, over his face. “You’re there for me when I’m fucked up. Always. But when I’m not…” His fingers knit together and he looks at her, sidelong over his shoulder, grim. “It’s like you don’t really want anything to do with me.”

Blindsided, she almost bites out, _You’re always fucked up_. It’s easier for her to be strong when someone else is not. You can’t have two people falling apart at once, and she’s always glad to be the one who is not. Still, “That’s not true.” When he doesn’t say anything, she adds, “Sometimes I think you latched onto me because of that. I was there for you when the worst happened.”

What if she’s the person he wants at the lowest point in his life and he wakes up in six months thinking _what the fuck?_

“Becoming a werewolf isn’t the worst thing that happened to me. I have a lot to choose from.” His tone is matter-of-fact, and a half-smile quirks his lips. “Don’t underestimate me.”

“I’m not,” she says. 

Jace nods slightly and then stands, shifts his weight and weighs his words before he says, “You know, I’ve got your voice in my head. Even out there, just now. Any time I think about doing something…stupid, I think about what you would say. And I don’t.” 

Maia hates the part of herself that still thinks, _I don’t deserve that_.

Jace glances at the door they came through before deciding, “I’m gonna get going. Is that okay?”

She clears her throat, manages to tell him, “Whatever you need is okay.” She tilts her head. “But you should get another shirt first.”

He shakes his head, waves a hand. “I brought an extra.”

Her laugh catches them both off guard so, at his puzzled expression, she explains, “He’s a real werewolf now.”

Jace smiles. “Learned from the best.”

Maia doesn’t get up and go immediately after he does. She knows she has to give everyone an update and rip Luke a new one for springing that on Jace, but not yet. She needs a minute first.

“Hey, just wanted to — oh. Did Jace leave?”

She needs a minute, so of course she’s interrupted immediately. Clary stands in the doorway, hands clasped together and twisting nervously. “Yeah.” Then, because she knows more is required of her, “He’s okay. Well, he will be.”

Clary nods. “How are you?”

Maia frowns at her. “Fine?”

The hands untangle and raise in a friendly shrug. “Not trying to butt in. You just seemed kind of — I know we don’t know each other that well. But I wanted to ask.”

Maia is aware she’s being defensive. She can feel it knotting up inside her, purring through her center of gravity like a growl coming from somewhere deep. She makes herself say, “Sorry. I’m fine. It’s just — you know. Complicated.”

Sometimes she imagines telling Gretel that she’s got a thing for a Shadowhunter. Former Shadowhunter. She can picture the raised eyebrow, practically hear the response: _giiiiirl_. (Lately, she’s imagined saying it to Jace, like a hypothetical. Likes to picture him shaking his head with a quick grinning grimace, telling her, _bad idea_. Yeah, yeah, she knows.)

She’s hungry for a girl to talk to. Maybe that’s why she keeps talking. “Liking him is really annoying.”

Clary smiles. “You’re telling me. Do you know how many excuses he found to lift his shirt up when I first met him? I don’t know who taught him how to flirt, but _yikes_.” Thoughtfully, “It is effective, though.”

“Don’t have to work that hard with werewolves,” Maia tells her. “We’re pretty naked as a group.”

Clary makes a funny expression in response, a slightly pervy and playful arch of the brow. Maia snorts.

“Yeah. Has its upsides.” 

Clary drifts closer. “And its downsides?”

Maia waves a hand. “You saw for yourself.” That’s part of the trouble of being a wolf. You’re laid bare whether you like it or not, one way or the other. 

“I don’t know what I expected,” Clary admits more seriously. “I guess it didn’t feel real before now. I’ve never seen him…transform. I mean. I haven’t seen much of him at all lately.”

“He’s a beautiful wolf,” Maia says with such unintentional wistfulness that she wishes she could eat her words. They hang stupid and obvious in the air, but then Clary moves closer again, subtle like she’s trying not to startle anyone.

She gestures between Maia and the empty space where Jace was. “You’re not…?”

“No.”

Clary sort of nods, clearly doesn’t want to push too much. Pretends to get it even though she doesn’t, couldn’t, without knowing the whole story. And Maia certainly isn’t going to tell her. Too many people know too much as it is. 

But Maia presses her lips together and eventually says, “I don’t want to be the girl he’s with _because_. Because he can’t be with you. Because he’s depressed. Because I was there.” She studies her hands, fingers curling against the denim of her jeans. “Because of the moon.”

She’d feared pity, but Clary is quizzical, like she’s trying to figure out an especially difficult calculus problem. “That’s stupid,” she says, with a bluntness that surprises Maia. She likes it. “Why would you think that?”

Maia momentarily does not know what to say. “Prior experience?”

Clary finally comes all the way over and sits. “Okay, so, what if none of that was true?”

She cocks her head and rolls her eyes, shoulders slumping against the wood paneling. “Yeah, what if.”

“I’m serious. Maybe you’re the girl he’s with because he really likes her. Because you were there for him. Because you make him —” A tricky thing happens in Clary’s throat. “Feel calm.”

They’re quiet. Maia’s gaze flicks over to her. “You know this is super weird, right?”

Clary smiles, sunny. “That’s how I roll.”

“It’s too bad we met like we did. Maybe we could have been friends.”

Clary only shrugs. “Why can’t we be friends now?”

Maia doesn’t stay long after that. It takes fucking forever to get to Queens.

A neighbor lets Maia into the building, and she gets the apartment key out from under the ceramic panda Simon keeps next to the door. _Dumb boy_ , she thinks fondly. He’s gonna get so robbed one day.

She eases across the creaking floor and into Jace’s bedroom, the door closing silently behind her. He’s sleeping deeply, one arm over his head and the other fisted tight in the bedclothes. His chest rises and falls. He’s frowning. She bets he grinds his teeth, too. 

Maia kneels next to the bed and indulges herself — brushes his hair back off his face, then runs her knuckle lightly down the bridge of his nose. Over and over until his face scrunches up and he shakes his head, blinks awake. “Maia?” he mumbles blearily, confused. “What’s — what?”

She bites her lip. And then she decides to let herself have what she wants. It feels impossible even with the words sitting in her mouth unspoken, but Maia doesn’t want to be the kind of person who gets tripped up by stupid bullshit. She’s not her parents, she’s not her past. She’s whatever she says she is. She reminds herself of that, and then she tells him, “I want to be your fucking girlfriend.” 

His brows draw together for the briefest of seconds, but then he’s smiling, grinning, snaking his arms around her to drag her into bed with a smothered yelp. “No one can resist all this forever,” he says, cheeky, and Maia groans. 

“You’re such an asshole. Forget the whole thing, I gotta get out of here —”

But instead she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.


End file.
